For me

I found this post on kellymom.com, which is a great breastfeeding website, and thought I need to place this somewhere so I can read it over and over again..so this is for me, but maybe it can help you to.

"I am never on Kellymom at 4:30 in the morning but since nursing my DD back down I have found myself awake thinking about Apple and all the other desperate moms of wakeful babies who may well be awake now too.? So to get back to sleep, I've decided to write a rambling sleep diatribe.? I am the mother of a baby whose sleep was abysmal pretty much the whole first year ? naps, nights, you name it.? I rocked, paced, bounced, nursed, reordered the day, reordered my life, so the frustration, the anger, the struggle, the exhaustion, the desperation has been my own.? I will also say that I don?t know anything about regular babies and sleep.? I only know from the inside about wakeful, nonsleeping babies.? This is the voice from the future for you as my DD is now 18 months ? my perspective is different now than from where I stood a year ago.You are horrified that the sleep is as bad as it is.? You are terrified that it could get worse, or not get better.? You know that there are bumps ahead in the road, even if you had a good sleeper ? there are teeth, mobility developments, night terrors, language, illnesses, and more looming in both your paths.? You imagine that to feel like you do now and to have a baby who sleeps, or not, as it does now, is how you will feel in 2, 3, 6, 9 months more.? It overwhelms you.? You don?t know many or any other moms who have sleep issues such as you and your little one have.? You have few places to go with the enormity of your feelings and get validity that it A) sucks and B) hasn?t been caused by either your omission or commission.? God help you if you are a working mom or a single parent with one of these children.I want to address the concept of teaching a baby to sleep.? I know you read all these books and articles in the baby magazines that assert you can and should teach a baby to sleep.? Step back from that for a minute.? What does that actually mean ? to teach?? Yes, I know, leave them alone, put them down sleepy, blah blah blah, I?ve read all that advice.? Teach.? I?m asking you to think critically about what that means.? How do you teach anything?? Is sleep a skill?? Before you say yes, think about it.? Is it?? Is hunger?? Is something so hardwired into the human biology a skill?? I don?t really see how the answer could possibly be yes.? How do you teach a biological drive to develop?? How did you teach your child to know it was hungry?? Did you know your newborn was born without binocular vision?? Did you know you were?? Who taught you to coordinate your eyes to see an image together? as one instead of as two, like a horse?? Did you teach your child how to do that?? Would you know how to stop looking at the world that way now and go back to monocular vision?? It is no different with sleep.Sleep through the night.? Through the night.? Through.? The night.? That?s your goal, yes?? You have a second goal too, right (maybe it?s the more important one for you even)?? Take a nap.? A real baby nap.? An hour.? Two.? Three.? Add on these two goals: Go to sleep.? Stay asleep.? How are you going to get there?? Is it all at once?? Is it gradual?? What is enough to make you happier, better rested?? Don?t say the whole night.? It isn?t true.? It isn?t.? You need a little better to keep the hope that eventually it will get totally better.? So what is a little?? A 40 minute nap, 3 hours of sleep at night?? Step down the goal, break it into its finest parts.? You want to win the Triple Crown when your horse isn?t even running in the Kentucky Derby.? Be realistic, don?t be desperate in this stage, because the desperation will mislead you.? Your sleep deprived brain will keep you from thinking rationally and honestly.? Get someone, your husband, a friend, your mom, to help you identify the tiniest, reachable goal to give you back some hope that it will get better.? Then have them help you get a sense of humor.? You need the sense of humor. I cannot guarantee that you will have an angelic sleeper in 3 months, or even in 6,? but I can guarantee you with the certainty that someone living in the middle of the desert can probably cross ?lose house to flooding? off the worry list, that your child will be sleeping better within the coming year.? And it will probably happen gradually.? You might not even notice initially that it is getting better.? But it will.? If nothing else, all babies will outgrow the need for 4 naps a day within the first year.? I hated naptime.? At 11 months my daughter was down to 1 nap a day (yes, I did help her make the transition ? she was ready, I just helped with the timing).? These wacky parents would say to me, ?oh it?s so sad when they give up the second nap,? and I would think h*ll no, I?m in heaven, thank God I only have to deal with one nap a day.? It was a relief only you moms of wakeful babies can know.? And the nap stretched into an hour long nap.? And then 2 hours.? And then back down to 1, and then back to 2. And here?s the most critical thing:? All the bad feelings you have, all the intensity, all the rage, the hatred, the fatigue, will diminish, maybe disappear.? Your child might still get up once or twice a night at 18 months, but you will not feel about it the way you do now.? You won?t.? I hadn?t thought about this last year, I didn?t know there would be the analogy, but I was thinking about it last night so I?ll share a story with you:? ?A few years ago now, when I was in my 20?s, my first husband died.? We had been married less than 3 years.? I can remember viscerally how I felt the night he died, lying in bed in too much pain to sleep and too much pain to stay awake.? It was physical.? The earliest hit of such grief and loss is visceral.? It sears.? Drawing breath burns your lungs and you feel like not just your soul but your body has been ripped open with a jagged knife.? I lay there asking myself over and over and over how could I live the next 60 years like this?? How could I survive living with this grief, this pain for so long?? How could it be?? I didn?t know then, I couldn?t, but grief changes over time.? It becomes less physical.? It becomes less painful all around.? Do I still grieve? Yes.? Will I for the rest of my life? Yes, but not like I did in the early days.? It is an entirely different experience now.And so it is with the sleeplessness.? Except, you aren?t only waiting for the feelings you have now about the sleep to be mollified.? Eventually your child will actually sleep better.? Or your son/daughter will leave for college.It?s hard to relax about the sleep.? Really, you can?t.? But don?t mistake that for a need to ?fix? the baby.? Put your singularity of purpose to good use.? Read the Science of Parenting, learn about your baby?s still maturing nervous system, understand what happens to your baby nuerochemically when faced with bouts of crying.? Then devise a plan to help you COPE, otherwise you?re bound for frustration:? You?ll just be the grandmother who gets cold so she asks her granddaughter to put on a sweater.? And find your sense of humor.Now I can go back to bed! "