 | Well, speaking from experience, this too shall pass, and pass pretty quickly all on its own. Your baby WILL sleep through the night again, and you don't need to worry that meeting his needs for attachment will compete against his need for sleep.
When a baby starts tackling a major new developmental stage, it tends to affect them day AND night. If you watched your baby at night, you would see that when he goes into a light sleep state between cycles, he will actually begin to stand up *in* his sleep. It's such a deeply compelled developmental action that they even will do it in their sleep.
But of course by the time they are all the way up, they are awake, and you can imagine how disorienting to a baby that would be--to wake up and find himself oriented vertically instead of horizontally and on top of that, discover they don't know how to get down.
With my babies, we had them in our bed with us or in a crib pulled up flush to our bed, so when this phase came along, I was able to sense their movement (our sleep cycles were synchronized) and I would just put a hand on their little backs to keep them from getting involved standing, and they would relax at my touch and go back to sleep.
But with crib-trained babies you probably are right on the money to focus on showing them how to get down throughout the day, and probably at night you can just go in and help him back down and pat him off to sleep. Keep a chair handy that you can sit in.
The phase sorts itself out pretty quickly all by itself. It just means some mommy night duty for you for awhile, but that's what we signed up for when we became moms.
Good luck!
Kathy |
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