Bed Sores

Sometimes -- no, all the time -- I wonder where we went so horribly, horribly wrong.

Everyone else we know whose kid is 2 years and 9 months or thereabouts old has loooooong since conquered the sleep demons. But our kid, nooooo, our kid continues, at the mere suggestion of sleep, to put up blood-curdling screaming fights that leave the whole family angry, depleted and psychically sore. And probably the whole neighborhood on the phone to DCFS.

This doesn't happen every night, but frequently enough to let us know that it -- is -- not -- okay -- to leave him alone to fall asleep. So most nights we resignedly stay with him, rubbing his back and singing a lullaby until he drifts off 15, 30, 45 minutes later. We creep out of the room like we did at six months, 12 months, 18 months, barely breathing and hoping the floorboards don't creak. And wondering when the hell the torture is going to end.

We never believed in cry-it-out of the extinction type, and for the record we still don't, though I can't say it hasn't crossed our desperate minds. We have, however, made several attempts to "wean" him from us slowly, to help him learn to self-soothe, in the currently-most-recommended fashion. This almost worked, just once, when Alan went solo with the process for three weeks straight. But when we brought me back in to try it, WHAM!, back to square one, and it hasn't been so promising since.

Moxie has a great theory that crying causes some kids to increase tension and others to decrease it. In her view, the increasers generally don't respond well to cry-it-out because they get too overworked by crying to settle into sleep. The decreasers, on the other hand, need a bit of fussing before they can doze off, and many of them get too stimulated by the very things that soothe the increasers: nursing, patting, lullabies.

Moxie had 99 comments on her post positing this theory. The vast majority were from parents saying, "Thanks so much! You've unlocked a great mystery for me! Now I get why X or Y solution didn't work for us!"

Alan and I, however, had different views on it. After two hours of trying to get the Dragon to sleep tonight -- one hour of me patting and singing to the Dragon; one hour of Alan going in and out as he (the Dragon) cried -- I described what I'd been reading.

Then, I said definitively, "He's an increaser. He only settles down with lullabies and patting; whenever we've let him cry a bit, he gets more worked up. It's hellish."

"No, no," said Alan, "he's a decreaser. Every time I go back in, he's settled down a little bit more."

I looked at him like he was an alien, then realized that our intelligence is completely fucked up. We need a spy -- some objective spook to lurk in a corner and take notes while we beg, bribe and cajole the Dragon to sleep, so we can get our story straight, so we can grow a real solution, so we can finally have some time to share work gossip, watch our backlog of Lost and fall into bed at 10:00, tired but perhaps finally sane once again.