He did it! He slept through the night!

Yes, everyone, lend me your ears (and pity): I was "blessed" with a child who detests sleeping through the night.  He has never done it.  Ever.  Until about a month ago.  Bear in mind, my kid is 16 months old.  I haven't had more than 6 hours of consecutive sleep at night since before I got pregnant.  That's approximately 730 and a half days of shit sleep.  I mean, don't get me wrong...I take naps whenever I can, but it doesn't match that feeling of well-being and God-I-love-the-worldness that a good night's sleep brings you.

I can't blame it all on Desmond, however.  We definitely instilled some crap sleeping habits in him.  For instance, we still allowed Desmond to have his binkie and although we had practically weaned him off it during the day, he still relied on it to sleep at night.  We also let him have a bottle of goat's milk every time he would wake up (this was post 12 months of age, of course).  All this meant that we would wake up every few hours to put the binkie in his mouth and every 3-4 hours so that he could have a bottle of milk.  Although some people would say that rocking him to sleep or letting him sleep in bed with us was another one of the "Bad" sleep habits, we weren't going to budge on those (we don't consider them bad habits).  So, what needed to change was his reliance on the binkie and the bottle to sleep.

How did we do it?  Cold Effing Turkey.  No weaning, no coddling, nothing.  We spent two sleepless nights with D in our bed, trying to caress him and soothe him while he sat in his crib (right next to our bed) crying.  We wanted him to know that we were still there to love him and comfort him but that he didn't need his bottle or binkie.  And, on the third night, he slept 6 straight hours.  It was almost biblical, I tell you.  He slept in his futon in his room for the majority of the night without waking up once.

Now I know that most of you have angelic, fantastic sleepers who have been sleeping through the night since they were 3 months old.  But I ask you to think back to the fog that was the newborn days and how sleep deprivation turned you into the type of woman who sided with the murderer in the scary movie (I'm looking at you, LH!)  That has been me for the last year and a half.  So, this is HUGE news in our house.

And now?  He's keeping up the good fight.  He wakes up just once a night and has no problem going back to sleep.  Next on our agenda, though, is getting a king-sized bed to fit Billy and I vertically and Desmond horizontally (the kid likes sleeping perpendicular to us.  Go figure.)

Des spooning Billy.  Don't worry...he could still breathe.

Des sleeping deeply and peacefully on our 1,321 mile drive to Salt Lake City.  That's right...stay tuned for more on that trip later.