Sleep regression.

Yowza. This has been a rough week. I never knew about sleep regression before becoming a mom. In fact, I was blissfully ignorant for about the first three and a half months of my kiddo's life. Oh sleep was always a concern, but I figured it would get better with time and, for the most part, it did. My guy was and continues to be a...healthy...eater, so we were (and still are) doing nighttime nursings, but he would eat and drift back off without an issue. Sometime around three and a half months though, that all changed and we went from sleeping in three hour stretches to waking up pretty much every hour. Screaming. We could rock him to sleep, but forget about putting him down or the crying would begin again. We began co-sleeping. It was the only way any of us got any sleep. It was easier to nurse and to comfort him back to sleep when he woke. There were still regular occurrences of dad having to take him down to the couch around 2 a.m., but we were getting MORE sleep at least.

Due to a series of real life events over the course of the next several weeks and months, we kept up the practice of co-sleeping. We had our first weekend away, our first vacation, an illness and pretty much a solid month of teething. All those things disrupted little dude's sleep anyway, so we figured why fight a battle that would be impossible to win.

At about the six month mark, when things calmed down a bit, I decided it was time to get this kid sleeping in his crib again. It was a bit of a battle for two nights, but we went back to our nightly routine and he started getting put down in his crib AWAKE and putting himself to sleep at night. Yeah, I stayed in the room while he fell asleep, so what? I've come to terms with the fact that I am strongly opposed to the cry it out concept. I know it works for a lot of people, but it's not for me. The good news is that since that time he has been sleeping in his crib at least until his first feeding every night! Yeah, we still co-sleep the rest of the night. He protests his crib fiercely after the first feeding and I value sleep highly in life. :). Also, if I'm being entirely honest, although things get a bit cramped in our bed sometimes, I like sleeping with my baby. The fact that I am able to get him to sleep alone in his own bed for some part of the night, while I run around the house doing the chores that didn't get finished during the day, is good enough. For now.

The bad news is that, for the past week, baby is back to waking quite often. Every couple of hours typically. And dad has had to head to the couch with him on more than a few occasions this week at 2 in the morning as well. Turns out we are facing something that every kiddo goes through, usually several times during their early years. The monster even has a name--Sleep Regression. Dr. google and all the baby sites will tell you all about it, but basically at around 7 or 8 months, babies sleep habits are changing and their brains are trying to process a ton of new stuff. They may also be learning to crawl. So it's almost like their brains are too busy to sleep or they wake up and can't fall back asleep. Good times. Oh yeah and the first major sleep regression hits around 4 months. Whaddyaknow? That's when little dude was learning to roll over, we'd see him rolling on the monitor and it was usually when he had rolled onto his belly that he woke up. Now he sometimes sleeps on his belly, but wakes up in the night doing pushups. It's a good time to workout apparently. Crawling prep, no doubt, but still rough on the sleep.

So, consider yourself warned. There is a thing called Sleep Regression. It is real. It is not a joke. And it's kind of a bitch.