Sleep - Travis

I am blessed: I used to work for a company that would often fly me to different cities for conventions. Plane flights are one of my favorite things. If I was Oprah doing a favorite things episode a 6 hour plan flight that landed right where you started would be one of the prizes. The push pull girnd of security, the "let's get on with it" at the gate, the hustle and squeezing of stowing your bag and getting buckled into your seat. And then, the engines fire up, I shift just a little in my seat, and before you know it the guy sitting beside me is waking me up saying we landed and need to de-plane.

I don't know how I recieved this ability but it's not just planes: but also cars, sofas, floors, etc.. The first time Lindsay took me back to her house to meet her parents, we had gone on a hike and got to her house around 4. She went upstairs to wash the hike off and when her parents got home there I was asleep on their living room floor.

I want my son to have this ability. If I could go out and buy it I would cut back to two meals a day to save up for it. So I have this unspoken theory that babies should be put to sleep in a myriad of different ways. Unspoken because as long as a theory is not voiced no one can argue or disprove or even dissaprove of it. I guess that's a little fear or insecurity of mine not speaking this. One of the Coveys writes that the gift God gave man that he didn't give the animals is self-awareness. The ability to see ourselves from the outside in a way.

Most books will tell you that you should establish a set routine and follow it every single time you want your baby to sleep. But what do books know about raising kids. Most books are awful parents. Case in point, Take a look at nearly any sequel and see if it as good as the original. The prosecution rests.

All this is to say that I think it's a good idea to put Henry to sleep in multiple ways. Sometimes I find us getting into a rut and Henry has been doing his darndest to convince us that there is no silver bullet. One night (and you can go back through our posts to find which night) Lindsay and I tried a particular sleep method: an extravagant concoction of feeding substance and method, bathing timing and duration, and special swaddling and lighting etc., and it worked. That night Henry slept for 7 hours WooHoo. Since then we have sacrificed many or our evenings trying to duplicate, down to the breath, all that we did that night. And we have been relativly successful.

Until recently. Oh, he has still been sleeping 7ish hours, one night he woke up at 4:30 but that is not common, but each evening has become more and more difficult as we attempt to recreate that first night, almost completly against his will. See Henry doens't like that sequence very much. It makes him overtired and very cranky.

Last night we didn't have the option of performing our usual "contortions of sleep." In fact we really didn't do anything more than we do at 1 in the afternoon when he needs to sleep. And the little angel slept 8 hours for the first time.

We put him down in his crib at 11 last night and didn't hear a peep until he woke us up at 7 this morning. Nothing we did. He just slept. Thank God.