That’s an excellent question.\u00a0 I’m beginning to think that it’s not me.<\/p>\n
I came to this realization a few moments ago when I was rocking the 2 (almost 3) year old to sleep for her nap.\u00a0 That’s right – I said it – rocking her…to sleep….for her nap.\u00a0 What exactly<\/em> is going on here?<\/p>\n When Abigail and Hattie were little I made sure they fell asleep on their own and I turned up the music and ran the vacuum when they were napping so that they would learn to sleep through anything.\u00a0 Guess what?\u00a0 They can sleep through anything.\u00a0 Thunder, lightning, nuclear holocaust…anything.\u00a0 With Laura, we have quiet time during her nap.\u00a0 There is<\/strong> a rational explanation….if she doesn’t have a nap, the latter part of the day is almost unbearable.\u00a0 One half of my brain wholeheartedly agrees with that logic.\u00a0 The other side is laughing at me.<\/p>\n When Abigail was a baby, I rocked her to sleep every night until she was 15 months old.\u00a0 She was my first child and I cherished those moments with her.\u00a0 When she got too big to put her in her bed easily after she fell asleep, we suffered for a few nights while she learned to self-sooth and fall asleep alone.\u00a0 I had learned my lesson.\u00a0 When Hattie came along we put her in her bed with her blankie and left the room.\u00a0 She’s never had a problem.\u00a0 You would think that I would be a master at this for the third child, right?\u00a0 I don’t know what happened!!!\u00a0 Maybe it’s because she’s my baby…my last<\/em> baby.\u00a0 Maybe it’s guilt.\u00a0 Laura has a congenital heart defect that she got from me.\u00a0 It requires a pacemaker that was installed when she was 13 months old.\u00a0 Even though I know it’s not my fault there is still some subliminal mom guilt in there somewhere. There’s always been a reason for her (my?) need to be soothed to sleep.\u00a0 Skinned knees, moving, stomach bugs, surgery, ear infections, bumping her head on the coffee table…the list goes on and on.\u00a0 Now, I put Laura in her big girl bed, fix her blankie and leave the room.\u00a0 She waits about 15 seconds then moves out into the hallway with all of her paraphernalia.\u00a0 She proceeds to lie down, talk, read books, ask us to fix her blankie, etc…until finally falling asleep.\u00a0 Before going to bed, I pick her up and put her in her bed where she stays for a while before climbing into bed with us.\u00a0 I’ll ask again…what exactly<\/em> is going on here?<\/p>\n On other issues, we are better parents.\u00a0 She goes to time out for hitting or yelling and even goes to her room on her own if she knows she’s been bad.\u00a0 But still she gets a lot more slack than the other 2 girls.\u00a0 It seems a lot worse when I put this all in writing….<\/p>\n I guess it’s time for a shift in the balance of power.\u00a0 I’ll start when we’re out of potty purgatory…or tomorrow…..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" That’s an excellent question.\u00a0 I’m beginning to think that it’s not me. I came to this realization a few moments…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[16,17,5,14,19,255,18,15],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-children","tag-abigail","tag-hattie","tag-laura","tag-nap","tag-pacemaker","tag-parenting","tag-rocking","tag-sleep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/30"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/annakatedonovan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}