I know it’s not a contest exactly, but both of my boys were pretty much the world’s crappiest sleepers. Neither one of them slept through the night until they were 4 or 5 years old. From birth till about 2, they were up sometimes every hour! It was completely and utterly grueling.
When my first son was little, I tried everything to get him to sleep longer. I tried putting him to sleep “drowsy but awake.” No matter how asleep he was, he’d pop right up, wide awake. I tried having him nap more or nap less. I shifted his bedtime earlier, and later. I used room-darkening curtains and a white noise machine.
But nothing really changed the fact that he woke up very frequently and needed a parent (usually the one with the boobs) to get him back to sleep.
So, I gave up.
Or rather, I made peace with the fact that waking up frequently during the night was something I just needed to live with
Still, I needed something — anything — to make those night wakings a little easier.
One night, almost by chance, I figured out what that was. It was almost 3 a.m. and probably the ninth time my son had woken up that night. (Yes, I was counting, and that was part of the problem!)
Totally stressed out and frustrated, I looked at the clock and then slammed it right down
I kept it face-down on my nightstand for the rest of the night until morning, and do you know what happened? No, my son didn’t stop waking up. I’m sure he was up several times that night, in fact. But because I wasn’t waking up fully to read the clock each time he woke, I had lost track.
I was basically sleeping through his wakings. Not noticing the clock — and thus not scrutinizing the number of hours or minutes between his wakings — allowed me to drift back to sleep so much more easily. It was like magic. Even though he was waking just as much, I wasn’t as stressed by it and I was getting more sleep because I was barely waking up to feed him each time.
I ended up keeping that clock face-down for years
Once his little brother was born, and seemed to have poor sleeping skills as well, I did the same exact thing and without hesitation. It was so valuable to me, and I was less sleep-deprived — and definitely less anxious about his sleep patterns — than I was with his big brother.
Now there’s one big caveat here.
This method worked for me because we co-slept with our babies and toddlers
(We did it safely, of course: On a firm bed only, with a guardrail, no loose blankets or pillows, never under the influence of drugs, etc.) This meant that when they woke up, I didn’t need to get up to soothe or nurse them. They were right by my side, and I could latch them on and go immediately back to sleep.
I think this method could be helpful even if you don’t co-sleep, though
Especially if you are finding that you are counting your baby’s nightwakings, noticing how much time has passed between one waking and another, and anything else that's keeping you awake.
But even if this trick isn’t something that could work for your situation, I think the spirit of it is something to consider. Basically, some kids sleep like crap, and accepting and adapting to it — rather than pushing back against it — is the key to making it through those incredibly exhausting baby years.
