Confessions of a Tired Mama...

I have a confession to make.

Last night, I put our son into a Tylenol induced coma to entice him into sleeping through the night again.

It's really not as bad as it sounds. The sleep situation has gotten complicated enough at our house that we needed to do something different last evening. Joshua's night waking has been a new routine, which has ended in my weakness (and delirium) with a visit to the spare bedroom where we both fall asleep. I'm deathly afraid that I'm creating a monster, so I decided that last night was the end of it. Even in all of his (many) night time wake ups, I've always stood relatively firm to the idea that I didn't want him in our bed with us. So I don't have the foggiest idea what's caused me to soften up in the last week or so. Could it be that two years of this nonsense (and that's not counting the 40 weeks of being up 16 times a night to pee) is finally wearing me out?

Joshua and I had a nice talk after his bath last night. We talked about how he was such a big boy, and that I knew he was able to sleep all night in his bed. Since he's so incredibly verbal, I know he understood at least parts of what I was saying. Heck, he was repeating most of it back to me. He kept saying "Josh big boy...sleep bed all night". I told him how proud of him we would be if he stayed in his bed without crying in the middle of the night. He'd say "no crying...bed all night". I felt like we were on the same page.

I keep thinking that he's waking up in the middle of the night with some kind of pain from his molars, and that's what's making it too hard for him to put himself back to sleep on his own like he's been doing for the past 6 months or so. So I decided to try a little bit fo Tylenol. One part of my brain says that it's the stupidest thing--- Tylenol would be out of his system before his normal night waking times began. But on the other hand, would it make him so sleepy that he could get into a deeper sleep and maybe not wake up at all?

I heard two peeps out of the little man last night. One at 4:30 and one at 5:30. Neither materialized into anything. He called for me at 7:00 this morning with a big smile on his face when I came into his room. And all was right with the world again. While I'm not delusional enough to think that we've conquered anything earth shattering, I am thankful for one solid, uninterrupted night's sleep. We'll try it tonight without Tylenol and see what happens.

We're tossing around the idea of moving him from his crib to the toddler bed, but I'm not sure that I'm ready for that quite yet. Although, last night he jumped up into the spare bed, laid his head on the pillow, pulled the blanket up over him and said "Night Night Mama", which led me to believe that he's showing some interest in that. One plus would be that we could lay him down in bed and sit with him to read while he fell asleep IN HIS BED as opposed to in our arms. But, the downside is that he's not showing any signs of being a climber, nor is he unhappy in his crib, and it's literally the only safe zone we have for him in the house right now that he can't get out of. Who knows. Regardless, I don't think we'll be making any changes in the setup until after our weekend away next weekend for the wedding. No sense making it any harder on Aunt Libby than it needs to be.

This sleep training stuff is tough business. I had no idea...none...that the toddler sleeping issues would be more complex than the newborn ones. But we're doing the best we can.