A NEW ROUTINE

Although there were times over the past 2 years that we thought we may ALWAYS be rocking or walking or singing or feeding or snuggling James to sleep, it turns out his time of independence has arrived.

While James was great at STTN starting at 4-months (and still is, unless he is sick or teething, though he usually sleeps through that too), he has never REALLY put himself to sleep at the start of the night. Not until last weekend, anyway. When he was an infant, we rocked him after his bedtime bottle until he was near comatose (when his thumb finally dropped out of his mouth), then laid him into his crib. When he moved to his big boy bed, Jay started laying with him after he finished his sippy of milk, and stayed with him until he drifted off. When Jay started school and could no longer risk falling asleep next to James (since it happened pretty often, and he needed to be up studying), we started letting James fall asleep with us in front of the TV. I know, I know, we're such hypocrites, since we so very rarely let him watch TV, but it worked (we'd just watch something totally boring and uninteresting to him). Of course, as he's gotten older, that has backfired, because now he finds EVERYTHING interesting. Even the nature and history shows set to calming music have him excitedly pointing at the TV and naming anything he can.

So, last weekend (while Jenny was visiting and he was fighting the good fight particularly well, since he wanted to stay up with all of us), we made a spur-of-the-moment decision to start putting him to bed awake. Our new rule is that he can watch TV with us until an 8:30pm cutoff time, then we take him to bed. No more laying with him. No more sitting at the door watching and waiting for him to fall asleep (while he keeps his eyes on us, and often asks for books and cuddles while he fights sleep with every particle of his being, sometimes until 9:30pm). Nope, now we lay him down, tell him it's bedtime, give him a kiss and tell him that we love him and we'll see him in the morning. And that's that. We leave the room. He goes to sleep without a peep. Usually within minutes. The first 2 nights, he'd continuously get out of bed and open his door, where we were standing quietly, waiting for him (we KNEW he'd do it). We just kept telling him to get back in bed, then repeated our goodnight spiel. The first night took about 14 tries. The next night took only 2. And the rest of the week he has stayed in bed from the start. This weekend, it even worked for naps. And I think that's enough to call this new routine a success.