We've been playing musical bedrooms at our house. All in the effort to integrate baby #5 into a four bedroom house.
Up until a few weeks ago, baby Jewel has slept (lived) in our bedroom. This is the first baby who has slept in bed with me almost the entire night, every night for this long! Finally she was getting too big to be really comfortable curled up in a tight ball against me. Not to mention, she is over 18 pounds now and my whole arm goes numb, and I wake up with one terrible crick in my neck!
So with lots of encouragement from Manly, we moved Jewel to the crib to share a room with Angel. Things went much better than we thought possible, but it was difficult to get them both asleep at the same time. And with winter sickness, colds and earaches, the two youngest were continually waking each other up and making their parents sleep deprived. I'd take care of Jewel, and Manly would take care of Angel. Things got pretty tricky the week Manly had to work the night shift! I'm SO grateful he doesn't work that schedule regularly!!!!
Baby Jewel began getting really fussy at night time, wanting to be rocked continuously, and so we made the decision to begin the "Ferberization" method. (Dr. Ferber has a famous sleep solution) This is where you put your child to sleep with their normal night routine, and then if they are crying you come back after 5 minutes, then 10 mintues, then 15, then 20 and then every 25 minutes. (if they're still crying) Each time you go in their room, you spend 1 minute comforting them, talking and singing and assuring them, but YOU DO NOT PICK THEM UP. It's so agonizingly hard, but it's worked wonders for each of my kids, and for most of them, it only took 2 or 3 days. And when its done, they've learned how to comfort themselves back to sleep, they're not dependent on Mom and Dad for help going back to sleep, and they love their beds.
We moved Angel into the big girls' room for the duration of the adjustment period.
I forgot how hard it was to let your baby cry like that. It's torture! For both baby and parents. My kids were horrified after all my lectures of helping the baby right away when she cries, that I was letting her do it ON PURPOSE. But I'm so happy to report that after 3 days, Jewel is a pro at going to sleep. Each night it took less and less time for her to settle down. And with Manly almost never being home in the evenings, that's a real blessing to me and the rest of our crew!
Now I've got to decide whether to keep Angel in with the big kids, or move her back with Jewel. She had a hard time getting used to her new sleep location, but I'm kind of liking it. I was putting Angel to sleep in that room anyway for her naps so that her naptime wouldn't conflict with Jewel's. It's nice for Angel to nap in her own bed instead of Louisa's.
And poor Einstein felt so left out. He wanted to know why one of the kids couldn't move into his bedroom. He's been begging for a roommate for years. I keep waiting for him to wake up to the luxurious realization that he's the ONLY kid who will probably ever get his own bedroom! Right now, the kids have a special tradition of doing a big "sleepover" on Friday nights in one of the kids' bedrooms. They look forward to that, but we don't do it every week cause it's a pain for Mom to pull out floor mattresses and sleeping bags, and they stay up almost as late as they would if they were having a real sleepover.
Right now I'm really enjoying Jewel having her own room, and I'm considering keeping it that way. The biggest pain is that with potty training, Angel keeps on needing new clothes, which are always in her bedroom while the baby is sleeping. I've begun keeping a pile of spare clothes in the hall just for her!
I wish I could wave a magic wand and double the size of my house... or at least put on one more bedroom!
p.s. since posting this last night, I have to ammend that I never let my baby cry it out if she's crying because she doesn't feel well. For that, I just have to rely on Mama's Intuition. If she's sick or teething, I will rock her all night long. Last night I got only 3 hrs of sleep because she's fussy...and I'm hoping it's teething, and not another earache. I was hoping that I could just take her back to bed with me, but now that she loves her crib she won't sleep in my bed anymore. In my family, that seems to be the price of my children learning to love their crib. Once they learn to sleep there, they don't like being rocked to sleep in Mommy's arms anymore, and that just breaks my heart. But for me, that's better then your child never going sleeping their own. It's a trade-off; I wish I could have it both ways!
She loves the jumper more than any of our other babies. She likes it better than her high chair or excer-saucer. The only thing she likes better is to be held!
She likes it best when music is playing, or the kids are running around and being noisy, because then she feels like she fits in. It's so much fun to watch!
Here Einstein the builder has created a magnetic candy holder for all his candy. With it all out in the open, no wonder it went so fast. I wonder if Lucy was jumping on his chair and sneaking candy off of those magnets?
