Sleep baby Sleep

Some moms are overly worried about feeding their kids all natural/chemical free foods, some moms are overly worried about autism and immunizations. I guess I am overly worried about forming bad habits. Especially when it comes to sleep.

My brain thinks things like  "If I don't put him to bed after 9:30 every night he will wake up too early in the morning. If I rock him to sleep he will never learn to sleep on his own, if I let him cry it out he will not sleep well, be cranky, and hate me when he wakes up. If he wakes up too early from a nap, he won't go back to sleep on his own if I rock him. If I bring him into bed with me in the morning he will sleep better. Worst of all, if I don't pay ridiculous attention to all these little sleepy things I will have a three year old that won't sleep by himself or have any good sleep habits."

The longer I am a mom the more my experience shows me that most of these thoughts are silly, and the issues resolve themselves over time. And I'm pretty good about quelling most of my truly paranoid thoughts into infrequent worries. But I still find that when I'm under stress or when I'm sleepy, they still creep into my head and stick till my brain is working again.

Brad started out last week with a cold, or maybe teething I never know, and so his beautiful, normal sleep patterns started going crazy. It always takes me a few days to figure out something is up. So instead of waiting to see how things go, I start in with the over analyzation in the mean time. I began worrying about what I am doing that might be causing the problem or what I can do to help. It rarely occurs to me that Bradly will shift back to normal on his own.

So I started with a warmer blanket. This seemingly helped. Then he started waking up early from naps. So I rocked him back to sleep and put him down. He slept for another hour and a half. Sweet success right? NO. More waking up, more sleeping at odd times. What what what?? Teeth? Cold? nobody knows.

This week. All better.