Family Life

Contrary to what you might think from this photo, Micah does not like being put in bed. In general, he wants to be held all the time and doesn’t like being put down, and he especially doesn’t like being put down in his crib. Bedtime is often drawn out and painfully noisy, as the baby screams his disapproval. It doesn’t matter that he’s tired and sleepy and needs to go to bed. He does not want to be put down.

He’s 8 months old, and at this age we had shifted the older boys out of our room into their own room. This always resulted in better sleep for Debbie and I. So we thought, Right, it’s time for Micah’s move. And a few nights ago we moved his crib into the boys’ room. The older boys will sleep through anything, and they’re well and truly asleep by the time Micah goes to bed. We hoped there would be no problems.

Micah didn’t change, of course. He started screaming the instant we put him in bed. That was OK. We just went off to bed ourselves. We could certainly hear him, but he wasn’t right there and we could live with it. He’d wear out eventually and go to sleep. After a while we heard Daniel call out in a sleepy voice, “Mummy I need something to cover my ears! Get me something for my ears!” The poor boy, having to put up with his brother’s indignation and rage.

So Debbie and I lugged Micah’s crib upstairs to the office, screaming baby and all. We turned the light off, shut the door, and went back downstairs. To Micah, this added insult to injury: put to bed and abandoned. His protests cranked up a notch.

We soothed Daniel back to sleep and went back to bed ourselves, with only a faint, distant screaming to disturb the silent night. At 1am the screaming stopped and the baby finally went to sleep.

It’s a harsh life for a small child. It’s also hard for Mum to bear, leaving her baby alone like that. But he’ll get used to putting himself to sleep. When there’s no longer any fuss at bedtime we’ll move his crib back downstairs.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 9:31 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.