It's Sixty Hours Later And He Doesn't Appear To Be On The Path To Eventually Talking Through His Troubled Upbringing With Some Social Worker

So when we last left Mr. Baby, we were just into the second night of what Jen euphemistically calls "what is euphemistically called sleep training". And where the first night took about an hour to get him to sleep and the second night took 17 minutes, last night he went to bed by himself without crying at all. I played with him in his room, put him in the crib awake, he tossed and turned and fidgeted for several minutes while I lay on the floor next to the crib, and within ten minutes he was asleep and I was watching baseball back downstairs.

I bounced down the stairs with this "I'm the fucking man, dog" smirk before I cracked open a celebratory Banquet Beer.

And now I'm sitting downstairs again after putting him down the same way for the third straight nap over the last 24 hours — he's used to getting to sleep this way for naps, now, as well.

So from Wednesday evening to now Saturday morning, I think our child has been trained to sleep in his crib without us rocking him to sleep in our arms and trying to put him down in the crib without him then waking up and crying and us having to repeat the process again and again until we finally give up and sit in our bed with him sleeping next to one of us so that we are unable to eat or piss or basically live a normal adult life.

Jen was talking to a friend of ours with a kid who I think is about 18 months now, and she was telling Jen that they resisted "crying it out" for some time for all the typical reasons — i.e., it seems heartless and cruel and whatnot — and then one day they found themselves in similar situation to where we were, where the kid's sleeping patterns were taking over the parents' lives, and they just had a fuck-it moment where they let their kid cry it out and the only thing that they regretted was not doing it a half a year earlier. The more people you talk to, the more you hear that it's usually never more than a few nights, and, what's more, they usually say that they wish they did it months earlier.

And to be clear, we wouldn't have done this with a two-, three- or four-month-old whose brains aren't developed enough to acquire behaviors that can be changed, but rather a seven-, eight- or nine-month-old (we're at about 9 1/2 months right now). Basically, at some point it becomes obvious that "crying it out" is worse on the parents than the child, and that it's a matter of when the parents are ready to do it.

Because, also basically, it's not that big a deal to have a kid cry for one hour or even two hours for one fuckin' night, especially if two nights later, he or she is sleeping without crying at all. In retrospect, it's kind of amazing to me that this aspect of "crying it out" isn't highlighted more: I don't know if we were just really lucky (so far) (knock on wood) (and clearly I don't know shit from shit so I probably shouldn't be talking anyway), but Christ Almighty, it wasn't that bad.

And then there are the positives: A child sleeping in an adult bed, whether at night or during a nap, is in constant danger of falling out, even if you're sitting right there with him; also, I can't believe a child is getting more restful sleep while you fidget next to him tapping on a laptop or watching "Instagram That Ho" than if he is in his own crib; and also, it's much safer to have a parent get stuff done around the house while a kid is in his own crib than if he's crawling around the floor eating paper clips and ant turds.

What's more, after the initial hour of crying, the subsequent spells of crying have been short — no longer, in fact, than if I had been holding him and trying to get him to sleep (i.e., not more than several minutes at the most). So basically people freak out over one lousy hour of crying in a kid's life. It's totally ridiculous; part of me even wonders whether people discourage "crying it out" to keep women down. Conspiracy theories are especially attractive to those who have not had much sleep.

But all the same, last night I got sad thinking that I'd never again have my guy napping on me or curled up next to me looking like a sweet little angel, this warm little bundle sleeping so peacefully. As of Wednesday that's probably gone forever — or at least until the next one. And to think that I didn't even realize it at the time — even though it should have been completely obvious that's how things work — makes you realize how fleeting these moments really are.

But at least I can watch college football again with the sound up, and not for nothing, that's a big fucking deal.