Eitan somehow ended up in our bed last night.
The “somehow” seems confusing, I know. Eitan is a toddler, almost 20 months old, so we assume that he didn’t make it out of the crib on his own. His upper body strength is actually pretty impressive, as I’ve seen him basically do pull-ups on his bookshelf and hoist his body up over the railing on his crib.1 That being said, it’s hard for me to picture him getting over the railing while still holding on so that he could drop down to the floor and land on his feet without hurting himself.
Our assumption, of course, is that either Trudy or I brought him into our bed in the middle of the night. This is much more logical, especially since Eitan usually ends up in our bed that way, but neither of us can remember what happened.
Eitan used to be a fantastic sleeper. He slept straight through the night from the time that he was two weeks old until he hit six and a half months. Then he got sick and then he started teething and then something else happened and he has basically been waking up multiple times each night ever since. Part of the issue is that we live in a one-bedroom apartment and Eitan’s crib is in our room, so he sees us when he wakes up and wants to come into bed with us so Trudy can nurse him back to sleep. But Trudy finally got sick of getting woken up so often, partially because she would stay awake while she was nursing him2 and partially because she ended up exhausted for the entire next day when she had to look after him. As a result, for the last couple of months we’ve been sleeping in the living room to train Eitan to fall back to sleep without nursing.
Up until a few nights ago, we had started to see some real progress. I went into the bedroom if Eitan woke up and coaxed him back to sleep without bringing him to Trudy and he had started getting used to not nursing at night.3 He was sleeping for increasingly longer stretches before waking up to the point where, over the weekend, he slept straight through from 8:30 PM to 5:00 AM (when the heater woke him up). The next night he slept until 6:00, which was even better. Our practice has been that, if he wakes up after 4:00 AM, I bring him into the bed so Trudy can nurse him and they both sleep more until 7:30 or 8:00, so the fact that he was sleeping all the way until at least 5:00 was amazing.
Monday and Tuesday nights were not quite as kind to us, as Eitan went back to waking up a few times and eventually ended up back in our bed much earlier than we would have liked. Monday night, in particular, I found myself awake during the wee hours of the morning a few times because I felt Eitan’s foot not-so-subtly pushing into my back and nudging me towards the edge of the bed.4 Last night we resolved to get back into our habit of me going in and getting Eitan back to sleep while Trudy would stay in the living room, which is why I was so surprised, when I woke up at 5:00 AM to use the bathroom, to find Eitan asleep between Trudy and me.
My first question to Trudy, after she woke up, was, “When did you bring him into the bed?” Trudy claimed that she had absolutely no recollection of bringing him into bed and that she thought I did it. We’re assuming that Eitan didn’t rappel down the front of his crib Cliffhanger-style5 so it would stand to reason that one of us brought him in. Trudy later said that it’s possible that she woke up in the middle of the night and brought him into our bed even though he hadn’t woken up but that she’s not sure. All I know is that I didn’t hear him cry and I didn’t wake up before 5:00 AM and I definitely wouldn’t have touched him if he was still asleep in his crib.
What do you think happened?
1. I was standing right next to him so no, he didn’t fall out.↩
2. Except for the one time when she and Eitan both fell asleep and they stayed that way for a half hour until I finally lost patience and took Trudy’s nipple out of Eitan’s mouth myself so that I could transfer him back to his crib. Oh, and by the way, neither of them woke up as I did it.↩
3. I would rub his back and sing to him most of the time. Sometimes it worked quickly, sometimes it took longer. For what it’s worth, if there is a Guinness World Record for singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” consecutive times, I’m fairly certain I shattered it last Wednesday.↩
4. Get it? Sleeping on the edge? This used to happen to me all the time when I first started the blog, way back when we were still sleeping in our actual bed in our actual bedroom.↩
5. And that he’s not Nightcrawler.↩