I’ve never had any trouble “springing forward” as we call the shift to Daylight Savings Time and usually Sarah didn’t either. She was a very good sleeper for most of her life except when she was a newborn, which was a very hectic period, to say the least. As I’ve said before, she was a very good nurser and she was basically at it all night. By the time she was four months old, we were pretty desperate for a good night’s sleep. Or a few hours of unbroken sleep.
Everyone had advice for us. Sleep train. But what did this mean? Put her down drowsy but awake? She acted like we stole her wallet when we did that. Ferberize. This sounded mysteriously clinical and vaguely related to carpet-cleaning. Cry It Out. Not appealing at all and neither one of us felt we could handle it. Something called The Sleep Lady Shuffle. We bombed at this; Sarah seemed to have incredible spidey senses for when we shuffled off. The vacuum noises and swaying recommended by Happiest Baby on the Block? All fun for Sarah and Dad but not sleep-inducing.
Or maybe we just couldn’t do it right. We were constantly critiquing each other. No, don’t pick her up! You don’t do Phase One like that! This was probably the most argumentative phase of our marriage. We felt incompetent and irritable. And Sarah was a kind of a Miss Crabapple herself.
To those who wonder why we didn’t just let Sarah sleep in our bed, she was already there every night, and that just made the problem worse. She really liked nursing, all the time — say every 45 minutes — with a great deal of gusto, and a lot of groans and deep sighs while she ate. Frankly, she sounded like a Swedish Porn Star. It was impossible to sleep through, and Max was wearing earplugs.
So what did we do? We first-worlded the problem and hired a sleep trainer. We went to the sleep trainer’s office when Sarah was four and half months old and basically cried and told her what tired, irritable, and pathetic schlubs we were. (Did I mention that by this time I had wrecked our car driving to work on 3 hours sleep?)
The sleep trainer agreed. She called me an all-night breastaurant. Then she gave us instructions for how to put down Sarah (in her own room, in her own crib), to check on her in five minutes, then in ten minutes, then in ten minutes again if we needed to, reassure her but not pick her up, and so forth. Sarah also needed 3 naps a day (something she had refused) and a “dream feed” for the first week.
Sarah turned out to be an honor student and not only slept 12 hours that first night but took all her naps and basically from that day forward turned into the sunshine kid we knew. It was amazing what proper sleep did for her personality. And for ours too!
Of course, at the time all this was going on we had no clue Sarah had any medical issues at all. She was a normally developing baby as far as we knew and her pediatrician told us, even a bit advanced for her age. She had a “pet word” that she used when she wanted to nurse, she would look at me and say “Nee.” That was her word for nursing when she was an infant. I remember we told the sleep trainer that and she was amazed. “Does your pediatrician know that?” she asked us. We felt very smug about our little superstar.
Since she was ten, Sarah slept in a SleepSafe Bed. It’s a special bed that’s built like a hospital bed that can go up or down at the head or foot or elevate and lower, but it’s made for kids so the rails are more hidden and come in colors. Her bed was red. We also put lots of stickers on it of Minions, Minecraft, and peace and love. I took it for granted that she was safe in bed. Certainly I never thought of her in danger there.
The First Year Without Sarah 