saying goodnight to the bottle
He actually got through it pretty easily, though. The first few days, he screamed for as long as an hour before wearing himself out, and then often woke up after only the barest of no-frills utility naps. Extensive chill-out routines and reading and singing (not previously part of the naptime scheme, only the bedtime one) didn't help anything. He would relax, flip the pages, drink his water, and then still freak out when I put him down and left the room.
But on about the fourth or fifth day, he only cried for about fifteen minutes, then slept for two hours. The next day, ten minutes, and a great nap. Finally--and it's not lost on my symbol-seeking mind that this might have been the seventh day--I put him in his crib with several of the books we had just read, and he just looked up and said "bye bye!" as I walked out. (In the same tone of voice you'd use in saying goodbye to somebody who you liked well enough, but were sick of talking to, and were ready for them to leave, but you still wanted to be polite.) He sat in there for another five minutes saying "bye bye! bye bye!" over and over again, then chattered about other things for a while before going down for a record-books nap that lasted nearly till his dinner hour.
Since then the routine has been nothing but brilliant, and though some of the naps themselves have been messed up by other forces, we have clearly broken the milk-bottle-sleep association in the daytime. Now comes the night.
From the earliest days this dude has demanded very specific conditions in return for his participation in the sleep enterprise. We have friends who took their sleeping infants to movies, restaurants, baseball games, and they wouldn't even stir. At a wedding a few weeks ago we saw a newborn sleeping on one of the tables at the reception. These experiences are wholly alien to us, and I think it was only by wearing J in one sling or pack or another for the first six months of his life that we managed to stay just barely this side of colic. Rockers? Gliders? Swings? Bouncy chairs? Great devices all, but don't fool yourself that they have anything to do with actual rest. Because of the intense organic bounce and loping rhythm he demanded, I spent his first summer and fall striding scores of purposeful miles around the neighborhood at all hours of the day and night.
Even after he got into more mature sleep patterns and learned to use a crib he remained a light sleeper, continuing to wake at least once a night, often several times. We figured out pretty quickly that the easiest way of dealing with these wakings, while maintaining productive daytime lives, was to stumble to the fridge, grab one of the arsenal of bottles we prepared each night before bed, and swap it for the empty one sitting somewhere in his crib. We took away the binky around ten months, but we'd been reinforcing the power of milk-bottle-nipple three, four, five times a night ever since. That's the psychological fortress we helped build, and now we're making siege on it with nothing but a few soothing songs and our power to resist his screams.
Last night was the first of the new regime. It started rough when he found that a central part of his bedtime routine was missing, got surprisingly quiet for a while, and then, somewhere during the 2 o'clock hour, devolved into a freaky screamfest. The several times we did go in to comfort him, rather than his regular determined self, we found him in an unfocused, agitated state that we had a very hard time snapping him out of. He was up an hour early, even though he went to sleep nearly an hour late, and was nothing like the loud, charming little explorer he usually is in the mornings. Eventually he came around, but was listless and dull all morning, just like the fall weather that finally arrived.
So we're really hoping for another seventh-day turnaround here.
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