Sleep

From the moment we brought Joshua  home from the hospital I thought I had gotten off scott free. I had no idea what people were talking about when they would say "Be prepared to be up every 2hrs to feed him." He slept 4-6hrs as a newborn, they stretched for about a month to 6-7hr stretches. I was amazed. As he grew older, something clicked, and he stopped sleeping. He could not go to sleep by himself. I read EVERY book on sleep for infants and toddlers. We tried the Sleep Easy Solution, which was a gradual process...we did Dr. Ferber's method of letting him cry it out in his crib...starting from 5mins until we hit 20mins, which lasted up to two hours with no let up. He would cry until he threw up in the bed. We tried putting him to bed awake or drowsy, we tried after rocking him to sleep, nursing him to sleep, and so on...you get the picture. When Joshua turned a year old he was no sleeping in one to one and a half hour increments. I was no longer sleeping and had become bitter to every one else around me. I loathed the advice people would give me. No one could tell me what was wrong with my child. Why wouldn't he sleep like other normal babies and toddlers? What had I done wrong? All I knew was that I had failed somewhere along the line and I couldn't do anything to fix it. Raul suggested we bring Joshua to our bed. Instantly, he slept...and he slept 8-10 hours straight. I became a totally different person. I was no longer walking around in a haze, ready to bite any one's head off if they even spoke to me. We moved out of our house at the end of March and moved into an RV...we no longer had a place to put Joshua other than our bed still...by this time he had been in our bed for six months. We got our house on the land just before he turned two (twelve months in our bed)...fast forward to today...Joshua will be 3 in four months and still can not get himself to sleep on his own and hates his own bed. A couple of weekends ago I had converted Matthew's crib into the toddler bed and put it in Joshua's room, thinking he'll love the bed...Yeah right. It was fun to jump on, but that was it. I could get an occasional nap out of him on it, but sleep there at night...I must be joking. I started loosing sleep, because now Matthew wasn't sleeping...he hated the pack-n-play I had put him in for the time being. Monday, I spent the morning putting the crib back together for Matthew. Joshua gets his mattress on the floor. The first night we got 5hrs straight of him sleeping in his own bed (we had to rock him to sleep first), last night Raul had him in our bed...well, he kicks...Joshua that is....and started to just become a nuisance...I picked him up and amongst all his many protests that he won't kick anymore, I brought him to his room, to his bed and laid him down. I laid on the floor next to him and told him to go to sleep. He cried that he wanted our bed, he wanted daddy, he was a baby and Matthew was the big boy...and so on. Finally, he fell asleep. The thing is...so did I until 3:30am when my whole body was screaming that the floor was not the place to sleep. I got up...crawled into my bed and snuggled up next to my husband. It lasted thirty minutes before Joshua came running to our room. Hey, he slept for 8 hours in his bed...although not by himself. 

So, what do I do? I know I need to keep putting him back, but what do I do? Do I sleep on the floor with him until he falls asleep? Do I change the door knob on his door with a new one and just lock his little tooshie in his room all night long...come to think of it...that might work....but then he'd bang on the door and wake his brother up in the room next door. I'm at a loss...I wish someone could tell me what is wrong with him...why did he never want to sleep like other infants? Why can he not self soothe himself and go to sleep in his own room? Even his pediatrician can't give me an answer so we'll continue to try and break our nearly two year habit of him in our bed.

Joshua sitting on his bed on the floor

One of the few naps in the crib converted to toddler bed