Sleep?? Is it possible?

What with teething, and learning to crawl, and practicing new sounds, and trying out a few words even (BALL! Mmmmmmmooo!), Jack is a busy little man and it is no wonder sleep is difficult.  I know I have a hard time sleeping when I am learning something new (ok, been a long time since I learned anything new, but my job comes to mind, even though it's been three years since that was new).  I definitely have a hard time sleeping when I am in pain.  So why do we expect our little ones to just know how to sleep and to sleep well?  To me, sleep is like anything else - walking, talking, crawling - it will come if I am patient.

And last night my patience was rewarded.  Not with a full night's sleep.  Haha.  No, not even close.  But I am pretty sure Jack slept a "long" stretch of about four hours.  Yay for Jack!  Yay for sleep!

I say I am "pretty sure" about this because in my delirium I wasn't up to my normal time-keeping self.  I know it was had to be longer than normal though because I sure am aware of the time when I am waking up every hour!

The thing with sleep, at least in my experience, is that it is not linear, like I expected.  You know, you see all of these pictures of babies in magazine ads sleeping peacefully in their cribs (HA!!!!) and just think that's the way it is.  Baby is born, wakes up a lot, starts sleeping longer as he gets older and eventually, around a couple of months or so, is sleeping through the night!  Right??  WRONG. 

I'm sure this is the case for some babies.  But not for mine.  No, mine likes to wake up.  A lot.  Sometimes more than a lot.  Sometimes he has a few good nights of sleep (like last night) and I get all excited.  Is this it? Is he sleeping through the night now?  And then he goes back to waking up constantly.  It's all over the place, this sleep thing.

Somewhere around eight or nine weeks I let it go.  At first, every time bedtime rolled around I would think, "will this be the time he sleeps five straight hours?" only to be disappointed when he was up a couple of hours later.  Once I let this all go out the window, it got much, much easier for me.  He will sleep when he is ready.  And until then I will hold onto nights like last night and enjoy that fabulous refreshed feeling that you get from, well, four straight hours of sleep!