Sleep just might be possible

Holy crap! Baby V is sleeping! WITHOUT ME.

In the past few months, when I've kibbutzed with other new moms, I hear them say things like, "When I went in to get her from the crib..." and I've thought, "What planet does that happen on? Where is it that babies sleep in their own receptacles?"

I know that some of you hippies think this is wrong, my desire to get my baby out of my bed, but I miss my husband terribly. He is too light a sleeper to share a bed with a nursing baby (whine suck burp snore... repeat), and he's been camped out in the guest room, waiting for an invitation back into our bed.

And it is wonderfully cozy, sleeping with my baby. OCCASIONALLY. But usually, it's just a pain in the ass, my friends. I've been contorting myself around her prone body, waking up filled with paranoia several times a night, checking to see if she's breathing and inadvertantly waking her up.

So until she stops waking up every 90 minutes, that is where all the action is: in my big old king sized bed. Me, Baby V, and a cat -- always a cat -- stationed at our feet. There, we can log a few hours of sleep at a time sometimes, or lie together reading "Brain, Child."

Well, today we've shaken up the whole system, due to my reading a book called "Teaching Babies to Sleep 12 Hours by 12 Weeks."

It's hard to get my eyes to focus now, due to the last three months of no sleep. (This kind of sleep deprivation permanently damages your brain, FYI.) But I curled around my honking nurseling and read the first few chapters last night.

If you haven't lived the bleary world of sleep deprivation, you probably don't understand why this book was such a revelation to me, but after reading and re-reading it with my wacky eyes, I understood the premise:

STOP FEEDING YOUR KID ALL OF THE TIME

That's not saying, "Don't feed your kid when she's hungry," but it's saying, "Stop sticking your boob in your kid's mouth to solve every issue." And with Baby V at 14 pounds, she is big enough now to last a few hours between feedings.

I had been feeding Baby V all of the time, not altering my boobage since the day she was born. I just latched her onto the boob whenever she whimpered, because that was the most brilliant solution I could think of. I didn't think, "Oh, maybe she's bored," or "Perhaps she's tired," or "Could it be that we just stepped on her head?"

I just solved every problem with food. What mother doesn't?

But unfortunately, this became an around-the-clock phenomenon. She got used to "snacking" all of the time, and never ate for more than five minutes, and never ate more than one boob. So for her, it was logical to wake up all the time to nurse.

So this morning, I "stretched" her. I fed her at 7:30am, then at 10:20, then at 1pm (it was an unheard of two-boober). The "ideal" in the book is four-hour stretches, but I'm easing into that idea, and I'm not going to implement it if Baby V seems truly hungry in the meantime.

The point of this WHOLE STORY is that she's still sleeping. In her crib. I put her down immediately after the 1pm feeding, and it's almost 4pm. Apparently she responds well to having a full belly!

Hey, I hear her stirring in there. I can't believe she slept this long!

PS: The image at the top of this post is a special little stuffed animal called a Wubbanub, which helps babies keep the pacifier in their mouth without Mama having to go replace it twelve times. The "Baby Coach" who wrote the book recommended that too, so heck YEAH I ordered it.