It’s a scene that rattles new parents and frustrates seasoned ones: In the middle of the night, your child screams from their bedroom, startling you awake as you scramble to their room and find your child sobbing and scared because they had a nightmare. Nightmares can wreak havoc on your household’s ability to get restful sleep and can lead to your child resisting bedtime unless it’s in bed with you - with the lights on.
As parents, we tend to think it’s a given that we will be perpetually tired while our children are young. Unfortunately, our society has somewhat normalized parental sleep-deprivation. We wear it as a badge of honor... “How many hours of sleep did you get last night?” one parent will ask another. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
At some point, every new parent wonders: ‘Is my baby supposed to do that? Is this normal?’ Morgan Shandler recalls several moments of new mama anxiety during the first few weeks home with her daughter Violet, who is now a busy one-year- old. “One thing that particularly freaked me out was when Violet would bob her head when attempting to nurse. It almost looked like she was having a seizure or like she was a broken-down robot,” says Shandler. “But my paediatrician assured me it was a completely normal part of ‘rooting’ for the breast.”
The moment I have been dreading for months has arrived: I can no longer contain my triplet two year olds in their cribs. Two-thirds of them are climbing out of their cribs and destroying the room. The one child who cannot climb out of their crib yet has declared her crib as ‘party central.’ The two monkeys go straight into her crib after they have destroyed their entire bedroom with such fun activities as opening the shades, emptying drawers, and dumping diapers. I find them like this on a daily basis, screaming and cheering as they bounce up and down in one crib together; this is how I knew I could no longer wait for them to make the transition to toddler beds.
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