Sleep, Baby, Sleep

I'm feeling lots of mommy guilt right now.  For the last seven months (longer if you count the fact that I couldn't sleep the last few weeks of my pregnancy) we've been up at least once in the middle of the night...every night.  At first it was because Bailey was being fed every two hours.  Understandably, we were up every couple of hours during the night.  But as she got older, it dwindled and dwindled to the point where she doesn't get a bottle or a diaper change in the middle of the night anymore.  In fact, we don't even pick her up out of her crib.  She's only been waking once in the middle of the night for the last six weeks or so, and it's been as simple as Scott or me popping the bink back in her mouth and she immediately passes out again.  As annoying as it may be to have to get out of bed and walk down the hall JUST to put a pacifier back in her mouth, I haven't minded it all that much.  Until last night...

Bailey has been congested and coughing for the last few days and, of course, hasn't been sleeping well as a result.  Friday night she slept in her bouncer in the crib and woke up just about every hour or so from 11pm to about 7am when I just gave up and brought downstairs for the day.  Saturday night, Madison had a sleepover with Bailey.  In order not to wake Maddy up all night, we let her have Bailey's room and Bailey slept upright in the infant car seat in our room.  Again, she was up just about every hour or two all night.  And it wasn't as simple as just putting her bink back in.  She screamed and fought and refused to fall back to sleep very easily.  I got a total of five hours of sleep all weekend, and Scott got just a bit more than that.  Last night, she fell asleep with no problem.  Scott and I were so tired that we went to bed around the same time that Bailey did.  Just as I was dozing off...scream!  Scott and I were up every few hours from then on out again.  

When she woke up around 4:00 this morning, I just couldn't do it anymore.  Scott was getting ready to go to the gym and went in to get her back to sleep.  She just wouldn't have it.  He came back to the bedroom and asked what I thought he should do.  In my frustrated and sleep-deprived state I did what I swore I'd never do.  "Let her cry", I told him.  I then proceeded to roll over and turn the volume off of her monitor so that I could see her but couldn't hear her (we have a video monitor).  I could hear her crying, even with her bedroom door and ours both closed.  I watched her crying on the monitor and it broke my heart, but I just couldn't do it again.  I couldn't summon the energy to crawl out of bed, walk down the hall, and spend the next 10 minutes trying to calm her down and get her back to sleep.  So, in a half-awake state I listened.  Fifteen minutes of her crying.  Fifteen minutes of me being torn between going in to comfort her and letting her learn to soothe herself back to sleep.  Fifteen minutes...and then silence.  I actually sat up and stared at the monitor to make sure I could see her stomach rising and falling so I knew she was still breathing.  She did it!  I should have been ecstatic, but I only felt guilty.

I know it's a silly thing to worry about and that lots of mothers let their babies cry it out to teach them to self-soothe to go back to sleep.  I (sort of) know that she won't be scarred and that in the long run it may help her.  But I just don't have it in me to do it.  I cannot watch my child cry and not  want to do everything in my power to "make it better".  When she cried herself to sleep I kept thinking, what if she only fell back to sleep because she just gave up trying?  What if she was scared or needed some kind of comfort and now feels like we abandoned her?  What if she thinks we don't care?  What if she really needed me and I just left her to cry?  Deep down I know that she won't remember this years from now.  Deep down I know that she probably wasn't thinking any of those things, I do.  But there's still a part of me ( a big part) that feels like I didn't do right by her in this instance.  I smothering right now in my mommy guilt...

She slept until just before 7 this morning, and when I went in to get her from the crib she smiled big like she always does and started kicking her feet.  When I picked her up she put both arms around my neck, buried her face in my shoulder and squeezed me so tight.  Maybe she was happy to find that I hadn't actually abandoned her.  Maybe she was just glad to be out of her crib.  I'd like to think she was just giving me a big hug.  Her way of saying , "Good morning, mommy!".  Either way, she doesn't seem very bothered by the fact that she cried herself to sleep early this morning.  She seems happy, like always.  And I guess, at the end of the day, that's all that matters.