Feeling Safe

We hit a major milestone this week. The boys actually fell asleep WHILE I was reading to them. A year ago our bedtime routine was as far as it can get from snuggles and quiet story time with relaxed, sleepy children. Getting the boys to fall asleep and stay asleep has been an ongoing challenge, as it is in many families, so this is a big deal for us and we are celebrating.

Before the boys came home we had grand plans of co-sleeping with them. We thought it would provide much needed bonding time and that they would benefit from the added security of having us close at night. Once we became actual parents, while those reasons certainly held true, we also realized that we - mom and dad - needed time to re-coop and recharge. Given the hectic nature of our transition last year, our bedroom felt like the one place we could find that time. I have this mental image of Mark and I last year, retreating to our bedroom after epic long bedtime battles, with books about "parenting your adopted child" or "dealing with toddlers" on our laps. Mostly we just sat there dazed in front of the TV until we crashed. The only time we co-slept with the boys in our bed was the day we arrived home from Ethiopia.

Even though the boys were two months shy of turning three when we came home, I deliberated for a very long time about whether to buy cribs or beds. We had been told time and again that a child of that age would probably climb right out of a crib, but they looked so tiny in their pictures and I knew that they had been in cribs in Ethiopia. Ultimately we decided on two little, low to the ground beds. The day after we arrived home from Ethiopia we put the boys down for a nap in those little beds and they fell instantly asleep and didn't move an inch. Mark and I congratulated ourselves on making the right decision.


The next day the honeymoon ended and the boys' anxiety about sleep went through the roof. The only way to get them to sleep, and we tried almost everything, was to hold them in bed until exhaustion overtook their fight and flight instincts. We pushed those little beds together and one of us climbed in between them for however long it took. For many months that time was two hours+ on average, and it was not the sweet snuggle time I had dreamed of. They did not yet know the benefits of lying still and close to someone who loved them and their survival skills and fears were in control, making it impossible for them to relax. Some of those fears they expressed while I held them in the dark, like their fear of wild animals. Other fears went unspoken but I suspect that they wondered what would happen to them next. They would talk and joke and cajole and push buttons and try to escape, and when that didn't work they would cry so loudly that I thought the neighbors were going to call child services. In the very early months, bedtime was so stressful that I lamented our decision to forego the cribs and I considered packing up the beds and sprinting to IKEA. Ultimately my initial belief that our bonding and their fears would benefit from lying in the same bed together won and we stuck it out with this semi-cosleeping method.

 

As far as staying asleep went, in the beginning they would stay asleep, alone in their bed, until 7 AM like clock work. I was grateful for this and needed it at the time but I suspected that once they realized I would come if they called, they would call. Quietly I wanted them to reach that stage, as in my heart I saw it as progression in their understanding of family and their attachment to us as their parents. Sure enough, shortly after I returned to work a year ago, they began calling. They missed me during the day and I missed them. Coming to them when they called felt right, as a parent would do in the middle of a night during the first year when a birth child enters a family. My feeling that co-sleeping was right for our family outweighed other alternatives and I began crawling into bed between them in the middle of the night. This allowed me to go back to sleep fairly quickly, gave them the close contact they craved, and mornings became a special time together where we could read and talk and practice snuggling without the anxiety that surrounded bedtime.

Last spring I emerged from a particularly stressful few months at work, where I had been away from home a lot and when I was home the boys' night time make-up sessions were more demanding than usual. I began to feel drained by this routine that had previously been working so well for us and I started wondering if I needed to make a change. Serendipitously, one of the lovely adoptive moms that I am so grateful to know invited several adoptive mom's to her house that week. I shared some of this story that night and on the walk to our cars one friend stopped me and said something to the effect of, "I think what you are doing is the right thing to do, and I think it will get better soon. Hang in there." It was such a simple gesture but it meant so much to me and it helped me rally the strength to continue. A few weeks later the boys started sleeping through the night.

I began writing a post in celebration of that milestone at the beginning of August but I never finished it. By the end of August we were feeling so confident in where we were as a family that we asked one of the boys' preschool teachers, whom they adore, to babysit for a couple hours while we went out to dinner - our second date night and our first with a babysitter other than their grandparents! On the surface it seemed to go well but it brought an immediate halt to sleeping through the night. It's hard to be sure, but I do think the two events were related. That was almost a month ago, and just this week they started sleeping through the night again, and now we've had two nights where they were able to relax enough to fall asleep while I read to them! We are going on our second "date" next week, so we'll see what happens next, but overall I'm pretty thrilled with where we are and it feels great to see tangible evidence that our boys feel safe enough to relax in my arms and on their own. What a difference a year makes!!

* In no way do I presume that our approach is THE one right approach to getting your child to sleep. Everyone must do what feels right for their own family and no two families are alike.