Parenting. The learning never seems to stop and I'm told it never will.The smallest decisions that you make can seem to impact whole heaps of problems, like for example allowing Ethan to 'stay up' on holiday with us (bad move!!!). And like bringing him in to bed with us when he wakes up at night or in the morning.
See, we've got ourselves into a sort of sticky situation. A situation where we no longer seem to own our bed. A very nearly fifteen month old little boy who goes by the name of Ethan seems to instead.
Since coming back from holiday our sleeping arrangements have got a whole lot worse. No longer do we have 'evenings', we now have Ethan up with us right up until we choose to go to bed. And then when we do go to bed around 9pm to 10pm to watch television, he comes in too. And that means he's in the middle of us.
All night Adam and I sleep on the edges of our bed, scared that we'll make him too hot if we are too close to him, scared that he might roll under one of our pillows if they're near him, so they get yanked right off to the side. We get kicked, my hair gets pulled, we get hot, we wake up all night. It sucks.
In the beginning, it wasn't like this. It was nice. 'We like snuggling up with him' we said. And we do. But not like this. We are now in a situation where Adam and I get zero time alone together. We get zero amount of break from Ethan to recharge ourselves. And that second baby we'd like to have, well I can't see how that's ever going to happen since not only are we never alone in bed together, we are never alone together full stop.
So, now we're desperately searching for a solution.
Controlled crying seems like the only thing that we can do. We just cannot go forward like we are right now.
We've tried controlled crying with him before on a couple of occasions, I'm trying it right now as I type this. He's been crying for forty five minutes and I've been in a couple of times to reassure him but he doesn't seem to want to stop anytime soon. In fact, I think he just gets worse.
When we do go in to reassure him this just seems to make the situation ten times worse. And then there's our own personal guilt and our upset. It's not easy leaving your baby to scream, any parent knows that. All I can think is, does he think I'm abandoning him?
I ask myself - Would I take him out of school just because he was crying and he thought that I had abandoned him? And the answer is clearly no, I wouldn't. I'd reassure him that he was safe and that I would be coming back. Surely then, this is the same thing?!
If I go and get him like I have been doing, then I feel I am feeding his insecurity and am responsible for his clinginess that has been so bad lately. Ever since we've 'given in' and let him sleep with us, we've been unable to leave the room at anytime in the day, even to go to the toilet.
This isn't healthy for any of us.
I need to do something about this. But my heart and my head is torn. And I often feel alone with what quickly seems to become a situation that I don't feel I am able to control anymore. But I know deep down that I'm not alone. I've spoken to lots of other parents and they've been through this too. The health visitor is sending someone out to see us who she says is the 'baby sleep person' and I am counting down the days. We've hit a point where we literally need some support to get through this. Because it's driving us mad.
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