To Sleep....perchance to dream???

T-Boz will turn 21 months on March 1st. In his 21 months, I would make a rough estimate that he has slept through the night (and I am being generous and calling 4am-ish as through the night) maybe 10 times in his life.

I haven't had the heart, nor the conscience, to do any sleep training with him. I did with L-Dog when he was 8 months old, and whilst it did work after only three days, having read many articles after the fact about the trauma and psychologicaldamage that sleep training, or more specifically, Cry It Out, can do, I vowed never to do it again.

T-Boz has had a hard time with sleep. Well, let me back way up there; initially, he was a great sleeper for an infant. He would routinely go through from 8pm to 2am before he was up for his first nursing session.. WooHoo!! I thought, I'm going to have a champion sleeper on my hands here! Then 4 months hit and so did the 4 month sleep regression, but we never got the sleep reprieve promised after the new skill was learned, or the growth spurt was over.

Add to this the fact that T-Boz is the slowest teether I have ever seen! Seriously - his first tooth was at 8 months and they have all come in one at a time, taking weeks to fully come through. He is just about done with his first round of teeth at the moment, but of course, we have the two year molars still to come (I remember them with L-Dog - he was up 5-8 times a night with those!)

This winter, there have been the pre-requisit snuffles and ear infections, all adding into the no sleeping mix.

Then finally, this past weekend, we had two nights in a row where he slept through till 5:30am. Could this finally be the light at the end of the long tunnel his sleep deprived parents have been hoping for? Well, no - he was up three times last night.

I am not going to complain, because in the grand scale of things, what's a few nights now with a little interrupted sleep? There are parents out there that would give anything to be woken up by their child complaining of a stuffy nose, or some aching gums. And so, I will chose instead to cherish those moments as I rock my son back to sleep, my cheek placed on his head of baby fine brown hair. And I will thank my lucky stars for his health and these moments that I will one day wonder how they passed by so quickly.