The Manual, Part One

Life is full of tired cliches, many of which make me unreasonably angry.  Not that I claim to be the most poignant person in the world, but it would really be nice if people didn't try to package every significant moment into the same handful of words that every other unoriginal person says.  There are many examples of this:

"My wedding was the greatest day of my life."

Was it really?  A day you knew was coming, probably caused significant stress in the months prior and was almost certainly rife with meticulously planned details that went awry?  ("Please write your Best Man speech ahead of time, Jonathan."  "Please have us walk into the reception to 'Indiana, Our Indiana', not some insufferable rock version of 'Here Comes the Bride.'"  "Please fulfill your contract and don't stop playing music a half-hour early."  ALL OF THIS WENT IGNORED.)  That was better than the day that, oh, I don't know, you first realized that you were in love with your future spouse and wanted to marry that person?  I smell a lie.

"He's in a better place now."

One of the all-time throwaway lines.  I never understood why, when someone dies, people don't just say to the loved ones of the deceased, "I'm so sorry for your loss, let me know what I can do to help" and simply leave it at that.  Why the assumptive, boilerplate commentary?  What if the deceased went to Hell, or at best, Purgatory?  That dude's pre-death living situation must have been pretty poopy if he still ended up in a better place post-accident.  God determines who goes to Heaven, not you, Awkward Well-wisher.  You have no idea if the newly dead did unspeakably damning things when you were not within earshot.  At the very least, let your co-worker ask you "Do you think my accountant is in Heaven?" before offering unsolicited platitudes.  I like to think Maria Shriver has learned this lesson.

"I hope you feel better."

As opposed to dying?  Thanks, gentle friend.

"Kids don't come with a manual."

I don't think it would feel good on the girl parts to push out a hardcover volume, so this is probably a good thing.  But for my own self-serving purposes, I am going to go ahead and say that while this is a ridiculous catch-all statement, it would be nice if someone could tell me how to deal with all of the unforeseen problems that come with child rearing.  Accordingly, we are going to start writing that manual.  It may not arrive with the placenta, but the goal is that 20 30 40 30 years from now, when Matthew is going through this with his 16 month old, we can look back at this blog and find all the crap Matthew put us through and actually have a record of how we handled it.  You other freeloading new parents out there can use it, too.

Today's topic: When your kid forgets how to sleep.  After doing it like a champ.  For a year.  And less than three months before Deuce arrives.  And our sleep ends.  OHNOOHNOOHNOOHNOOHNOOHNO.

This happened to us about three or four weeks ago.  All of a sudden, one night, Matthew went to bed at the normal time of 8:00 and then, just as we were going to be two hours later, woke up making noises similar to what I would expect from myself should the cable go out a half-second before Hulls bangs home the three that puts the Hoosiers in the Final Four.  Now, this had happened before, so we weren't concerned.  We always assumed it was a bad dream, took him out of bed, cuddled with him for five minutes, let him play for 15 more, and then peacefully back to the crib for the rest of the night.  This time, not so much.  When we put him back to bed, more visions of mommy getting eaten by a hippo.  Eventually, we got him to go back to sleep for an hour or two, only to have him again wake up and [insert a haha about terrorized screams.]  At that point, we gave up and put him in bed with us, which is where things became weirder--he went right to bed.  That never happens.  Whenever he is in bed with us, it turns into jungle gym time.  This time, he slept like a rock.  A rock that regularly kicked and punched his parents while deep in slumber.

Aside from being exhausted the next day because somehow the only one who ended up getting sleep in the end was Matthew, we still weren't concerned.  Until it kept happening, every night, for a couple weeks.

This post is getting long, so we are going to wrap this up.  But the gist is that we had no idea what was happening, no idea what to do and were getting quite worried that we were going to have two kids who couldn't sleep.  It was real easy to say "let him cry it out" when he was just crying as a four month old, not suffering from unending night terrors.  But in the end, that's what we finally did, and it thankfully worked (we had to do it twice, about 45 minutes each.  It was pleasant.)  The doctor thinks Matthew knows things are changing, and this is how he is communicating his fear of the different.  Honestly, knowing that made cry it out even tougher--it made us want to comfort him more.  Fortunately, we didn't do that, because two cry it outs and we are back to our ridiculously blessed sleep situation.

It is now dawning on me that the advice we are giving is the same advice everyone already knew.  Oh well.  The point is, we weren't expecting this issue, were clueless as to how to handle it, but in the end, "we solved it."  I use that phrase loosely.

[A tidbit from E: Bringing things full circle, this is where we really wanted to know where the manual was.  We went back and forth and agonized over what was the best thing to do, asking one another what's going to be most helpful for Matthew long-term?  If he's feeling stress over the changes in our family life, do we give him extra comfort because that's what he needs or do we let him cry it out because that's how to best teach him to self-soothe and get through difficult times?  We came to the conclusion that it was best for our whole family to have Matthew re-learn how to sleep so that sleep could be restored for everyone creating the healthiest and happiest environment.]