Sleep. Again.

I could not sleep last night because of a sleep book.

Friends of ours recommended another book that is supposed to help you help your baby sleep. I started reading it yesterday, and by the time I went to bed at 10:20, I was mulling it over, and I was wide awake.

This is the third sleep book I have consulted, and I am still marveling at the concept of baby sleep books, as most parents of a non sleeping baby who are therefore not sleeping themselves are too tired to read entire books on sleep and definitely too tired to digest a plan and then implement it. These books should be pamphlets.

That say "Deal with it."

All the books I have read tell you they can fix it. They sound like magic.

And I don't buy it.

I have already decided that there will be no crying it out, so that rules out a number of books, which actually seem like they could be pretty short:

Put baby in crib.
Leave room.
Close door.
Commence drinking.

The last book I read was too involved for me in my sleep deprived state, even though it specifically dealt with co-sleeping and had all sorts of ideas. There was no way I was capable of keeping a ten-day sleep journal and whatever else the plan asked for. I can't remember it now, and I could not remember it then.

This book seems to be trying to walk the line down the middle between the warring cry-it-outers (CIO) and attachment (AP) camps. But I get the feeling that she thinks the AP's are too touchy-feely, and I think the techniques fall more onto the CIO side of the line. Again, it's a three week process. And while I know that if it works, those three weeks would be worth it, it's hard to imagine being able to devote three weeks to the kind of consistency that is required of following a "program."

It's called "sleep coaching" or "sleep training," and, again, I don't know if I buy some of her premises. They seem to be tailored to make parents feel better about sometimes letting the child cry, though you let the child cry while you are sitting right there in front of it, watching it wail. She does the thing that all these books do, which is put words into the baby's head, telling us what the baby is thinking. In the CIO case, I gather it's "Ah, no one is coming for me, I guess this is a good time to develop my own methods for getting to sleep." For the AP's, it's "No one is coming for me; the world is hard and cold, and I am all alone." This book is saying "Mom and Dad are here for me, and I can do this myself because I have the support I need, when I need it."

I don't buy it.

It seems to me that if Finn is going to be thinking anything if I am sitting there watching him cry and reach for me, it's more likely to be "What the fuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck? You are RIGHT THERE! What the FUCK?!"