Many of you know that, the week after his first birthday, Joseph finally started sleeping through the night. Yes, until he was over a year old he was still waking up between 2 and 8 times a night (and looking back I'm really not sorry that it took him that long to sleep through the night because I feel like he needed those night nursings...maybe that will be a different post for a different time). Anyway, after about a month of sleeping through Joseph went through a couple of weeks of major sleep regression. He would wake up every night sometime between midnight and 2 am, and would be up somewhere between 1 and 5 hours. He WOULD NOT go back to bed without endless screaming in his crib, and we only let him cry so long. So we'd be up with him pretty much all night during this roughly 14-day period (if it were a week night I got up with him, but if it was a weekend we were all up). It was rough, but looking back, it was also kind of funny.
On several nights, we ended up trying every trick in the book to get him back to bed before giving up. Nursing, giving him a snack, giving him a drink (of water or milk), rocking, singing, walking, putting him in bed with us, etc etc. On several nights, I documented the hours passing as we stayed up with him...
Like I said, many nights we just gave up and ended up having a middle-of-the-night play party in his nursery in our jammies. :-)
The worst night was back just before Thanksgiving. He was literally awake for 6ish hours in the middle of the night. We didn't get him back down until 6am, and even then, that was sleeping between us in bed. That night was so rough that we decided to go driving around in the middle of the night. We found out that the McDonalds near Guilford College starts serving breakfast in the drive thru at 4am. We aren't big fast food people, but if you are up at 4am and hungry, your options are pretty limited. We were shocked to find there were quite a few people in the drive-thru that early! Here we are waiting in the drive-thru, in our jammies, at 4:15am-ish, with Joseph wide awake in the back seat...
And I have to say, the normally busy Friendly Avenue is pretty deserted at that time of morning...
On that night, we ended up pulling over in the parking lot of Fresh Market on New Garden to eat our food, and then rode around Greensboro for at least an hour praying Joseph would go back to sleep (he didn't).
I have to mention, while it was exhausting, a marriage can cover a lot of conversational ground when you are up at all hours. Among the topics David and I discussed at the wee hours during these sleep regression episodes were luxury cars and tumbleweeds. Fun stuff.
Sleep is back to normal now and I can't say that I'm not glad. But at least we managed to have fun while the craziness was going on!!!
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