How Did You Get Your Kids To Bed?

Kid #4 sleeping in his swing - another great help.

With 5 kids getting kids to bed has been a daily part of my life for the past 10 years.  I have also tried several different methods to get them to bed, and seen different results for each kid.

So I ask the question:

How did you get your kids to bed?

Here is a list of what we have done with each of our kids… good and bad and how it turned out:

• Our first really liked to sleep – it was nice and simple.  At 3 months old she started sleeping well through the night (she was the only one to do this easily).  Each evening though we would hold her and bounce or rock her to sleep and then try to gently place her in her crib… hoping she wouldn’t notice the change.  If she woke up we would coddle her again and slowly get her back to sleep and try to lay her down again.  As first time parents we were delicate and paranoid, if anything we did made my daughter cry we felt horrible.  Once she was sleeping though, she was good for the night.  As she got older going to sleep was something that she welcomed but she had, and still has a hard time slowing her self down and getting to sleep – she is the only one who has come down regularly at night with silly things to, “talk” to us about…  In all though she is not difficult to get to bed and really enjoys her sleep.
• Our second was totally different.  He seemed to need way less sleep and wanted to eat non stop; day and night.  He also loved to play with my wife’s hair while he nursed and would hold it against his cheek to help himself to fall asleep.  Since our first was so easy get to sleep thought the night we didn’t have much of a game plan other than to get him to sleep and put him in the crib… he would wake up over and over wanting to eat, and since he was so much more active when compared to our daughter, we thought he needed it – so he got fed all night long.  This left my wife exhausted and we soon had our son sleeping in our bed to be nursed, so my wife could have some sort of rest (I know some of you feel this is, “way,” bad… I have mixed feelings and opinions on kids in my bed… I don’t want to discuss those here in this post, perhaps another time).  So going on, he would nurse on and off all night… in MY bed… kicking me and comforting himself to sleep, when he did sleep, with my wife’s hair like a baby blanket.  After a long period of time doing this we decided it was time to start weening him off the night nursling’s, around when he started eating baby food regularly.  This was really tough, and still as fairly new parents we wanted the transition to be smooth and gentle on our son.  Our son was so use to waking up all night long to nurse, he would wake up over and over, almost every half hour.  Also if my wife was in the room, he wanted her to nurse him and for her hair.  Our solution was me… I ended up spending the next several weeks comforting him in his room, holding him and getting him to sleep, then slowly placing him back in his crib.  At first he seamed to subconsciously know if I stopped touching him, when I wasn’t he would scream, so I would keep my hand on his back while I slept standing/leaning by the crib until I felt I could slowly move my hand away… I would try and time this with his breathing to make it less noticeable.  I know it sounds lame, but this is what I did.  I would then sleep on the floor in his room to help put him back to sleep if he woke up, and he always did.  Gradually he started sleeping longer, and I got more and more time in my bed.  Eventually he was good to go and slept through the whole night and actually does really well with going to bed on his own now.  By far the most work out of all my kids.
• With our third we had a plan.  I was not going to go through what I did with the first two, especially what I went through with my son.  I didn’t want to bounce or rock kids to sleep and then gently place them in the crib, hoping for the best.  Our third was another girl and also enjoyed sleep like her older sister but did not start sleeping on her own through the night.  With her we had decided we were going to put her down awake.  We also had decided, once in the crib, we would not take her out until it was time for another nursing or morning… and I can say we never did.  Initially it meant a lot of crying and screaming (our third was by far the loudest of our kids and she could, and still can scream).  Each night the screaming time got shorter and shorter and soon she would get excited when it was time to go to bed, snuggling down and grinning.  She loved going to bed.  Still to this day she is the one that loves to go to bed at night, and she needs nothing from us to do it.  We did it right.
• Next was number four – another boy who wanted/needed to eat all night long and needed less sleep (I don’t know what’s with my boys and not needing much sleep).  Our plan was the same as with number three.  It worked well with him also but there was less love for sleep involved.  He would, and still does, lay awake playing with toys to get himself to sleep, these toys were almost always cars; not stuffed animals, not a blanket, and not mom’s hair like his brother… his cars.  In fact he can still be found in the morning hugging a toy car to his chest.  That’s what worked for him.  Now that he is in a bed and out of a crib thought he likes to get out and play with these cars on the floor… he still has to be reminded regularly to get back into bed.
• This brings us to number five and the reason I started this post.  When I started typing I was still listening to screaming.  You would think by number five, we would have it figured out.  The fifth was another girl, she does not seam to need quite as much sleep as here older sisters though, but not as little as her brothers.  She was really colicky though, and the only way we could calm her down to sleep was to bounce her… to sleep.  Slowly we began to slip back to, “no plan,” and putting her to down slowly in her crib so as to not wake her.  She also wanted to nurse a lot at night, and gradually she ended up in our bed, so we could maintain some sanity…  We were really slipping.  By the time that we started her on baby food though, we started saying we needed to let her cry herself to sleep.  We would try, and then we would end up taking her out, she also started to try and pull herself out of the crib and we were afraid she would succeed.  Finally we decided that was it.  I lowered the crib so she could not climb out.  We would then get her almost to the point of sleep before putting her in the crib… but still awake.  She would cry and then gradually go to sleep.  Tonight I put her to sleep just a little more awake than normal… she welcomed the bed, excited to go to sleep, and then screamed quite a bit longer than her standard courtesy cry of 15 seconds.  We’ll see how it ends up affecting her in the long run.  I hope she ends up loving sleep like our middle daughter; we’ll see.

Now that I have babbled on about mine, I would love to hear what you have done…

Nester Dad out…