First off, some backstory on the layout of our house. We live in a 100+ year old cute little 2 bedroom Craftsman home. It started life as a one story house with basement, and has evolved to a house with a finished basement, which doubles the effective size of the house to around 1600 sq feet. For the first several years, we had our bedroom on the street level floor, attached to the bathroom, and attached to the dining room (It's a circular floorplan) and we had the downstairs setup as a guestroom/office. When I got pregnant, we decided to actually LIVE in the whole house, bought ourselves a new bed, and had the bed delivered to the downstairs, where we setup our bedroom and turned the upstairs bedroom into Zac's room/guest room with a futon.
The thing to know is that the stairs are narrow and steep with a low ceiling. It's also important to note I've fallen down them more than once, and brained my skull more than once. As an expectant parent, I did not want to risk falling down the stairs or braining the baby going up and down in a sleep deprived state, so we started Z out in a co-sleeper on my side of the bed.
Things went a little sideways early on, and he ended up co-sleeping in bed with us until early July, when we got a pack and play for the downstairs and transitioned him over to it. This is where he's sleeping now, close enough that I can get to him easily, but not so close that he can reach over and grab the bed (or the bedside table). The problem is, if he wakes up and sees me, he rarely goes back to sleep without intervention - holding him, rubbing his back, getting up for the rocking chair, a little singing, something. The other problem is my husband sleeps like a log and never seems to hear the chattering, shrieking, sobbing now-awake baby. If I kick him and ask, he will get up and do stuff, but then I end up feeling like some sort of shrew for waking him up when he's sleeping and I'm already not sleeping, so I rarely kick/shove/poke him awake.
All along I've said that I cannot do the sleep training by myself, and I cannot be the only person going up and down the stairs to soothe him in the night. Ideally, I'd like to do this in two stages, one where we move the pack and play into the around the corner space in the room where he can't see us, but I can still be there for him, and the second stage where we move him upstairs to his real crib with a monitor by the bed where we can see if he's really in distress or just awake for the night time wake ups. In either scenario, I'm standing behind me "I can't do this by myself" statement. The times I try to play dead and not react to him being awake, I end up tensing every muscle in my body and crying silently until I just can't take it any more and I throw the covers back and do what needs to be done.
He likes to sleep with JB Bear on his face
The night before last, he woke up at 10:30, seemingly from some sort of a bad dream. I held him on the edge of the bed and used my body to rock him back and forth while rubbing his back, and he went right back to sleep for me to put him down. Around 1, he woke up screaming, pulling his knees and writhing in pain, with a majorly wet and poopy diaper. He's got a residual diaper rash, and I'm sure this wake up was discomfort. I got up, got him changed, and rocked him back to sleep, putting him down around 1:45.
At 3:30, his little switch turned on, he stood up and yelled "Hi. HI! Mama? Vroom vroom? Hi Mama! VROOM VROOM!" The nice "would you play with me?" tone disintegrated into whiny reaching for the empty bottle on the nightstand yelling and I ended up getting up with him - we went upstairs and happily played Vroom Vroom for the next 1:30. He took each stuffed animal out of the stuffed animal toy box, gave it a hug, asked me "Wuh-ZAT?", then tossed it to the side to repeat the process. We also pushed the popcorn popper around (vroom vroom), played with the Boogie Bus (vroom vroom) and walked around and around in a circle (vroom vroom).
Vroom Vroom Mama?
At 6:15, I started the getting ready for work process, gave him a sippy cup of milk, and strapped him into his bouncy chair in the bathroom where the little shit WENT RIGHT BACK TO SLEEP. I could have cried from the unfairness of it all. I finished getting ready for work, and we actually had to wake him up at 7:30 to get him ready for daycare so Mark could take him in for the day.
I really wanted to shout VROOM VROOM and wake him up.
Long story short, I haven't had a full nights sleep in over 14 months, and the average sleep time for me is 3.5 hours, then up for a period, with each sleep cycle in between getting a little shorter because I have a hard time falling back to sleep after the wakeups
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