Our nightly ritual of going to sleep is one of my favorite and one of the most maddening times of my day.
We normally start winding down around 8-9pm. Betsy will feed Seth one more time while I get myself ready for bed. I need to make sure that I am completely ready to go to sleep when he does. If I put him down to sleep, and then try to move around the room, putting on my pajamas or anything like that, he’ll wake back up about 80% of the time, and we’ll have to start the whole process over again. So I make sure I have everything ready for myself before I start with him. Once Seth is done eating, and I’m ready to go to bed, she’ll hand him over to me, and she’ll go off to get a head start on sleep.
I usually start by changing his diaper and putting him in some sleep clothes that make the night-time diaper changes easy – usually either a gown or a sleep sack of some sort. I then bundle him up in a blanket. Depending on how restless he is, this will either be a tight swaddle or a looser wrapping – the tightness helps calm him down, but it’s supposedly bad for the joints if used everyday long term. The key is to make sure his arms are restrained – over time, I’ve learned that Seth’s arms and legs are a lot harder to get to sleep than the rest of him. If his limbs are loose, he’ll wave them around and wiggle and hit himself in the face, and it’ll drive him crazy and it make it impossible for him to get to sleep. If he gets swaddled up nice and tight, his limbs aren’t able to move much, and the core of him is left undisturbed to drift off to sleep much easier.
We then start the walking. The bulk of our time is spent in a slow, shuffling walk back and forth through the house. The most simple patterns are the best – just a straight line from the front door to the kitchen and back again. If he is already asleep and I’m getting bored, I might walk a few circles around the couch or the island in the kitchen, but doing that while he’s awake generally prevents him from falling asleep.
I put on music as well. There seems to be no real pattern to his “favorite” styles of music. He definitely likes listening to the Compline services from St. Mark’s, as played on KING FM, and modern composers (Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, etc) seem to do the trick as well, but he’ll fall asleep to anything and/or stay awake all night listening to anything.
It took me a long time to figure out the secret, but it’s this – it’s all about how calm and relaxed Dad is. The walking patterns that are straight and simple are the ones that make Dad feel calm and meditative – but when Dad tries to get creative and explore new patterns, Seth wakes up too. The music that makes Dad relax or feel prayerful (like the Compline service) makes Seth relax too – but anything that’s too new or interesting to Dad will keep Seth interested and alert too.
So the walks at night become an exercise in self-calming and meditation. I take one deep breath for each pass through the house, inhaling as I walk through the living room, exhaling as I walk through the kitchen. I give Seth a finger to suck on for a few minutes to help calm him down, and take the finger back once he’s starting to drift off. All of the lights in the house get turned down, and the dimmer switch on the kitchen lights gets turned down progressively lower until we’re walking in the equivalent of candlelight.
The other secret is this – when he first falls asleep, keep walking. When he’s fast asleep, keep walking more. I usually set myself a time when I’ll allow myself to stop, and while I may lengthen that time depending on the need, I never shorten it. If I told myself that I was going to walk 15 minutes more, and he falls asleep 2 minutes later, I’m going to keep walking those last 13 minutes. He’ll always go through a “second wind” where he cracks his eyes open, makes a few sounds, and seems to be investigating what has happened since he was last awake. If we’re still in the same room, still walking the same pattern, still listening to the same music, he’ll fall back asleep and be content. If he’s suddenly lying in bed, the confusion may wake him all the way back up. So I keep walking until I know he’s asleep and will stay that way. The beginning stages of a baby’s sleep is like a thin lace of salt crystals – beautiful but incredibly fragile, prone to falling to pieces at the slightest touch. I’d much rather keep walking him until that sleep solidifies a bit more.
Finally, once he’s fast asleep, I lay him down in bed, and crawl into bed next to him. Again, even in his asleep stage, he’s aware of how alert his parents are, and if we try to talk or read in bed, he’ll slowly wake himself up. I can sometimes get 5-10 minutes of reading done, but once he starts to stir, it’s time to put down the book and fall asleep. Sleeping next to him is the best way to get him to sleep.
The first few months were fairly maddening while I was learning all of this – I had plenty of nights where I walked him back and forth for 90 minutes, and he wouldn’t fall asleep, and I would finally have to wake Betsy back up so I could collapse in bed. Even today, it’s so easy to make a “wrong move”, and just when you thought he was about to sleep, he’ll pop his eyes open and start crying. There’ve been a few times when there was miscommunication between Betsy and I about how deep his sleep is, and he’ll get moved around in bed while in those beginning stages of sleep, and when that invariably causes him to wake back up and starts demanding attention, I have to just bite my tongue and get back up to walk him some more. And there are plenty of nights in which I wish I could just collapse into bed and not worry about anyone’s sleep but my own.
Overall, though, it’s been really wonderful. It’s taken a while for me to learn how to put him to sleep, and the process may sound unnecessarily complex (or that he’s “spoiled” by his parents modifying their own lives to his so much). I’ll write more later about our parenting philosophy, but from a practical perspective, look at the results – the entire process is down to about 15-20 minutes in the evening, and he falls asleep and stays asleep for 7-8 hours before waking up for his early morning feeding. Those miles spent walking across the wood floor in my socks, my son cuddled up in my arms, with a calm mind and meditative heart, will be one of the most precious memories I’ll keep from his infancy.
