Nights four and five have sucked. Sleep training sucks. Kids are insane. This is all insane.
I’m too exhausted to write anything clever right now. It feels like there is no end in sight to this madness.
The thing that bothers me the most is not knowing why. Why won’t he sleep?
So many questions that will probably never be answered and that is more maddening than anything.
I hope you’re all sleeping soundly. I know how precious it is.
I’m not giving up.
In my opinion, having raised exactly one child, the strength of a toddler’s resistance to sleep is proportional to his need for certainties in the world as he knows it. He is testing with all his might to make sure that he is *not* so powerful that he can control the world around him. That would be chaos, free fall into nothingness, total anarchy. Once he establishes that you are indeed in control, he can go back to being a baby and developing with confidence that his parents are in charge.
But yeah, sleep deprivation is terrible, and I feel for you because a driven child keeps pushing after your tank is so empty you can’t even smell the fumes. But Lou needs you to outlast him in this process, so he can feel safe.