The bane of my life right now is Ruby's sleep habits. I love being a mom in pretty much every other area except this one. She doesn't sleep through the night anymore. Oh she used to. When Ruby was about 6 weeks old, she started sleeping all night. I hit the jackpot! I thought. I don't even remember how long that lasted. It seems like a distant dream now. It's partly my fault. I'm not good at being consistent. I have tried to let her cry it out, which is miserable. But I can never last more than a few days before I give in and pick her up or bring her to bed with me. I think it's probably worse as a single mom -- there is no one to reassure you at 3 am when you don't know if you should let your baby cry or go pick her up and comfort her. I've gotten so much advice from people about how to get a baby to go to sleep, I don't know which way is up anymore. I hate sleep training!
However, this post isn't really about sleep training. Tonight, Ruby woke up about an hour after I put her down. I went in and picked her up and rocked her for about 20 minutes. As I held her and smelled her clean hair, I started thinking about how sweet it is that she sleeps so well in my arms, even if I would rather have her sleep all night in her crib. My mom tells me a lot that it won't always be this hard, that she will get older and learn to sleep. I thought about how you constantly hear older people talk about how fast children grow up. Before Ruby was born, that went in one ear and out the other. Now, I am realizing that it really does go fast. She's already 7 and a half months, and I don't even know how that happened. One day, I'm going to look up and she's going to be graduating from high school, and I will wonder where it all went and what happened to my little baby? Every other mother on earth has likely had these same thoughts; they're not new sentiments. The point is one day I will miss these nights when I had to go in and rock my sweet little Ruby.
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