On the Mysteries of Sleep

There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Strange that I've covered more than two years of my daughter's life, and I don't think I've talked about sleep. Like most parents, we didn't get enough of it early on, and we appreciated it dearly when we did.

We would've killed someone to get her to sleep this soundly at 6 weeks old.

Sleep has been relatively easy for a while now, and LG normally gets 10-11 hours each night, depending on a number of factors. It used to be a glorious 12-hour stretch, from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., every single day. Then, a few months ago, she started talking to herself after we put her down. Bedtime stayed at 7, but she would babble for a while before falling asleep. At first, it was just a few minutes, but eventually these monologues for an audience of no one stretched an hour, sometimes more. There have been nights when she'd keep it up for two hours, passing out around 9.

(There was a brief respite from this behavior. For about two weeks in the summer, she went back to falling asleep immediately after we put her down. It was glorious.)

Most of the time, she sleeps just fine in the car. Most of the time.

I need to make it clear that 95% of the time, she's just talking to herself. She's not crying, not upset, doesn't have a dirty diaper. So we've been content to let her go. But that doesn't mean it isn't frustrating when you're cleaning the kitchen or watching TV, and you hear your daughter's hi-pitched squeal informing her stuffed mouse that she rode a pony, and the pony was white, and the pony was named Honey, and the pony went in a circle, and she likes ponies, and she likes rides, and...

In your head, or under your breath, you just keep saying "Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep!" And the whole while she just keeps going.

All the pre-sleep talking goes out the window when we're away. Travel seems to take all the vigor right out of her.

We've got no particular solutions in mind, although we did push her bedtime to 7:30 p.m. We figured we'd tire her out for another 30 minutes at best, and at worst, we spent another half hour playing together, which is just fine by us.

There have been a few days, however, that have tested how much babbling we can endure. A couple of nights of talking 'til 9:30, one 'til 10, and we start to worry that she's not getting enough sleep.

At first, I didn't think it was travel, but rather the Pack-n-Play. An ill-fated experiment involving setting the portable crib in her room proved that the Pack-n-Play has nothing to do with it.

So now, every night that she stays up talking until 9 p.m., I go into her room and give what Hollie has taken to calling a "sleep pep talk." More specifically, I suppose it should be an "anti-pep talk" since we want her to just calm down already.

Here's a sample conversation.

Me: Hey there. Why aren't you sleeping?
LG: I go to bed. I want to sleep.
Me: Do you? Cuz it doesn't seem like you're sleeping.
LG: (Some rundown of the events of her day, or, more likely, a listing of songs she's been singing to herself for an hour.)
Me: Okay. Do you know how we go to sleep?
LG: Nooo....
Me: First, you stop talking. No more talking, just stay quiet. Then you close your eyes. When you close your eyes, then you can start dreaming. And when you're dreaming, you're asleep. Do you want to dream?
LG: Yes!
Me: Do you want to sleep?
LG: Yes!
Me: Okay, then let's do that.

Just last night, she decided she would tell me how to go to sleep. So she ran through my part of the above conversation on her own. "I sleep! I be quiet! I close my eyes! I dream! I sleeeeeeep!"

The weird thing is, it seems to work. Nine times out of 10, she's asleep (or at least blessedly quiet) within about 5 minutes of the talk. The caveat: It doesn't work if I try to do it before 9 p.m.

Work hard. Play hard. Sleep harder.