Rock-a-bye Baby

OK, it's time for ANOTHER confession. Gosh, I write so many of these, it seems, that I feel as though my closets are full of skeletons. Well, the thing is... I have forever professed as to what kind of mother I would be and what i would and would not allow. You know how it goes, you see a mother in the store with her child throwing a tantrum and you say to yourself, "when I have kids, they will not do that". Over the years I had collected several of these "will nevers" and made a mental checklist of the kind of parent I would NEVER, EVER be.

but life is funny and God has a serious sense of humor sometimes, because my parenting plans leave me eating humble pie on a regular basis. The current case in point is the bedtime struggle my son and I are now having. in my younger days of all-knowing wisdom, I vowed to NEVER let my child sleep in the bed with me because that is such a hard habit to break. Well, that last part certainly is true. And I know this because I have completely failed at the first part of that statement. I have become the parent that lets her child come to the bed with her when he wakes up in the middle of the night. And lo and behold, he now wakes up in the middle of the night, EVERY night. Thus, the bad habit is officially born. And now, realizing my mistake, after countless nights of getting slapped in the face, I am ready to face this head on.

So now we are working on two things: Luke putting himself to sleep at night and staying in his bed all night. Much easier said than done. So far this week, a new bed time routine has been instituted, I have had to endure heart-breaking calls for "mommy" on the baby monitor, I have slept on the floor of his room to hold his hand through the bars, and walked in to check on him only to find that he had crawled out of the crib. It has been a rough week in these regards.

BUT... last night Luke put himself to sleep with relatively little fuss. Our next step is moving in to a big boy toddler bed. We went and picked out some new sheets and comforters yesterday to get ready for the big switch. More on that as the story develops, I'm sure. So... this is the bed I've made for myself and now i am sleeping in it. Or actually, not sleeping in it as luck would have it. Not for long though, not for long.