Stressful Times

Stress The past few days/nights have been the most stressful thus far as a mother. A different kind of stress I guess. Our son was getting too big, or was pretty much too big to be sleeping inside the dockatot in his crib. Also, him sleeping in this device is frowned upon anyways but that is in the past. We put our son in his crib, swaddled the first night and it was atrocious. He thrashed everywhere, not getting a good night sleep at all. The next day, I had a brilliant idea that if he is thrashing all over the crib, he should probably not be swaddled because what if he were to roll over. So, now our son was in a new area, his crib, wide open and not comfy like his dockatot, and now I took the swaddle away, his comfort net and close feeling that he has felt since he was a baby. These two nights were unimaginably awful. He would fall asleep in our arms rocking but the second you put him in the crib he would go from 0 to 100 in a split second with horrible screams and wails. He would snuggle in your arms the second you picked him up from the crib. I put an air matress in there to try and react to his needs quicker than constantly getting in and out of bed every ten minutes. At one point, I put my son on my chest and he slept 2.5 hours in the air matress with me, I was wide awake of course. His tears were covering his face and I felt like the worst, most terrible person in the world for making him suffer. I literally felt like my heart was breaking in my chest and pounding like crazy. Then, we decided, OK, we will let him cry it out for ten minutes but no longer. This is a long time. Sometimes it worked a little bit, other times, not so much. I found myself sitting outside his room for one minute as he cried, just balling my eyes out on the top of the stairs. What the hell was I doing? Was I being selfish that I just wanted to tackle two changes at once since he was going to be mad anyways? Was I trying to teach him how to self sooth? Did I just think this was the right thing to do at the time? Yes, yes yes. It is so true that babies do not come with an instruction manual. You need to guess what to do next and hope that it is the right thing. In this case, it was not. I was constantly crying, frustrated and going on two days of no more than a total of two broken up hours of sleep. I was a wreck. I went to my parents to try and sleep one morning but my mind was just racing and I could not stop crying or feeling like a failure or the worst mom in the world. I couldn’t forgive myself for putting our son through this. Yesterday afternoon, I had a good chat with my husband and we decided to swaddle him again in the crib. He has his comfort back of closeness and we will not unswaddle him until he is rolling from his back to his tummy, which might not be for awhile. He has not come close to even mastering the roll from his tummy to his back, which they say happens first. At this point, even if it is a month from now, when we would absolutely need to unswaddle our son, he will hopefully be used to his crib space and might have more self soothing tools up his sleeve such as thumb sucking, which he also has not mastered at all yet. I guess the bottom line is, stick to one big change at a time, master it as well as you can before introducing something else into the mix. Babies need love and care and soothing since they are really unable to do it themselves successfully. I still feel terrible but I do feel a bit better that we are attackinig this one change at a time.