Standing Corrected

Once it becomes financially feasible to take the initial plunge, there are a million and a half reasons TO buy a house.

But I'm not sure anyone besides Y and I would answer, when asked why he went for it, that it was because, "We were tired."

We were so tired we bought a house. Truth be told.

Ariel's never been much of a sleeper, and we used to blame it on the apartment, on the fact that he and Elan shared a room. Because we felt badly about upsetting Elan and preventing him from getting the sleep he needed, we could never properly teach Ariel to do so. And because we feared him growing too attached to the idea, moving Ariel into our room wasn't an option.

Of course, we tried everything, and it became pretty obvious that Ariel didn't sleep through the night simply because Ariel Didn't Sleep Through the Night. Not for more than a week at a time, at least.

When we moved, things improved at first. But he began to cycle again, going through weeks where he slept the night and others when he'd wake me every time he woke himself.

The last three weeks had been like that, and, again, I was lazy about treating the problem. I didn't ignore him in the middle of the night, and I didn't let him "cry it out." Doing so, he'd proven, wasn't very effective anyway and seemed cruel to do to a 2-and-a-half year old with a highly precocious and overactive imagination.

But three weeks is pretty much my limit - at that point, after no more than two or three hours at a time during a 6-hour night, I usually snap. And one morning, after a six-hour night of dragging my feet into Ariel's room to pat his back and tuck him in for the eightieth time, I snapped. I yelled at Ariel, really yelled at him, when he tried to tickle my neck and squeeze me off the bed while he caught the 6:30 AM "The Legend of Tarzan."

I'm a claustrophobic sleeper as it is. But still. There's no real excuse for YELLING at a toddler.

I went to work and felt guilty all day, because, really, the whole sleep issue was probably my own fault. OK, it was my fault. True, some kids are naturally better at the shutting down thing than others, some moms have an easier battle with the ZZZs. But weren't all kids, essentially, trainable?

So claim the Books. The Child-Rearing Books, like, you know, "The Baby Whisperer," or "The Magic Formula" (okay, I made that one up, but it probably exists). The books that want you to apply the same behaviors to almost every child or family system, regardless of their idiosynchracies. Or, as it happens, "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems," by Ferber, which was tossed through my mailbox that very day.

Yes, totally coincidentally, when I got home from work on the day of the Snap, something was glowing on the floor, light emanating from it with such intensity that I couldn't look directly at it, at first. Or so it seemed. Because on the day that I needed it most, a friend had dropped the book at my house - a follow-up to a conversation at least three or four months prior - with a casual note about it having just been returned to her from someone else.

Now. You have to understand that I've been entirely against these books for the past four and a half years of motherhood. Parents who waxed proudly poetic about how their robotically-sheduled child was the result of a cram session, frankly, freaked me out.

Because, I argued, every child is different. And forcing him or her to eat/sleep/poop at pre-ordained times seemed bizarre. I mean, you're only 3 months old once, right? Life only gets tougher. Shouldn't you be able to call the shots for just a little while? I can't help it, but when I hear the term "sleep-trained," I can only think of a dog, and parents who are "doing" a book are not typically fun to be around. They lose consciousness when it's two minutes beofre feeding time and the kid is hungry, MUST be home at exactly 6 pm to begin the prescribed Night-Time Routine, are generally married to their watches for months.

You cannot be friends with Book Parents when they're "in it," and they're hard to listen to, I thought.

Now I think, can you really be friends with any parents of newborns? Are any of them easy to listen to, and should they be, really, while trying desperately to figure out a new system, their new way of life?

I thought I'd done everything right with Ariel, everything that had worked so seamlessly for Elan. I had made bedtime enjoyable. I was consistent about naps and bedtimes. I let him cry when I felt he was old enough. And eventually, I tried giving up, letting go of the control, and with it, the hope that it would ever be perfect or anywhere near that: lying in bed with Ariel until he dozed off, or sitting in a chair in his room and tip-toeing out (the ultimate Book No-No!). September babies like me tend to be idealistic. Less-than-perfect wasn't easy for me to accept, but I figured I'd be happier if I just did.

The thing is, staying with Ariel while he fell asleep did nothing to keep him from waking up all night long. And that didn't seem healthy for him. Being tired made him aggressive and overly contrary during the day, which was way too far from perfect to stomach.

I'd failed.

Elan and Ariel are exciting, sweet, never boring and, according to everyone else, they're also, supposedly, "smart." And I'm extremely thankful they have intellectual potential, am sure it'll come in handy later in life.

But a "smart" child doesn't simply a happy parent make. Sleepy children? Their parents smile more, if only because they have cognitive brain function (no small feat).

So, that night after work, I looked at the book lying on the floor in front of me, read the Post-It and knew it was time. Time to give my friends the benefit of the doubt.

I got the boys to sleep and curled up on the couch. And read, skeptically at first. After all, the friend who'd loaned me the book had a one-year old. These books were written for brand-spankin'-new parents, weren't they?

Well, guess what? Ariel was in the book. The kid with the sleep associations, only not the pacifier/bottle/blanky association, rather the Mommy's Presence one (because I'm so "smart" I was able to make the mental leap).

Every mother has at least heard of Ferber's progressive-waiting method, I certainly had. But I'd never really stuck to it - the chart, precise number of minutes, and everything - for a length of time until last week. My mission was clear: I needed to break Ariel's associations with sleep, while assuring him of his safety and my presence.

And the change wasn't instantaneous, but after a few days, the little monster is back to sleeping nights normally. He still sometimes cries when I leave his room, but the frantic calls to the room next door of, "Elaaaan! My mommy LEFT!!" have subsided. He seems to understand I'm not leaving, and that I'm serious about him getting to sleep.

It's good, and it's not counter-intuitive or Nazi-esque. And it seems to be working.

So I'm a believer. Maybe little robots aren't so bad.

What's your experience been?