For the longest time, when we just had Caleb, I felt a lot of anxiety about nursing Caleb to sleep. I worried about this concept of the “sleep aid” or “sleep crutch” wherein, for example, you rock your baby to sleep and then you have to rock them to sleep forever, or if you nurse your baby to sleep, you’re going to have to nurse them forever, etc. I really enjoyed nursing Caleb to sleep, and he certainly enjoyed being nursed to sleep. It was something that also worked for my family situation because I work from home, and so I was able to take time out midday for naps.
He was a fairly good sleeper as a baby, all things considered. There were a few rough nights here and there, especially early on, but things generally sorted themselves out. There’s this advice around putting infants down when they’re “tired but awake” and they drift off to sleep on their own, but that never really materialized for Caleb, or at least I wasn’t doing it right. As brand new parents, we spent money on things like the Magic Sleep Suit or on a crib, but it turns out for us, as a family, the cheapest (I.e. free) solution was best, and Caleb co-slept with us, and we all slept better for it.
My anxiety was mostly around how he would eventually not need to be nursed to sleep. With Caleb, it turned out it was fairly easy. He was around 2 when I told him we were going to hold hands to sleep instead. After a day or two of a little crying, he went down totally fine. I would lay down next to him and hold his hand. We eventually transitioned to me sitting nearby, and then eventually just leaving him with a kiss.
He, now 5, is a great sleeper, and I never worry about him. In general, bed time is not really a struggle because he’s fairly obedient to being instructed to go to bed. That being said, due to the nature of our schedules, we often go to bed later than we should, so he may already be slightly tired, and we also read together before sleep.
With Naomi, I avoided much of the anxiety because I had nursed Caleb to sleep, and it turned out just fine for him. I nursed her to sleep in our bed, some nights taking longer than others, particularly when her nap schedule was a little off. I would play an audiobook and enjoy the completely unhindered time I had with her. When she was around 14 months, I began nursing her on a chair, and then we would go lay down together on the bed until she fell asleep. Naomi is a much feistier child than Caleb, and there was some unhappiness around this change at first, although she was somewhat pacified by still being in bed with me. After she got used to the new routine, we transitioned to her laying in bed while I sat on a chair nearby, reading out loud (my own book, haha).
I nursed Naomi until our trip last summer because nursing is a helpful thing to have to get through airplane rides or weird schedules in different hotels. However, she herself was mostly okay with being done with nursing, and I didn’t nurse her at all even on our plane ride back from Hong Kong to Toronto. And that was it!
She’s now almost 2.5. Our nightly routine, after bath time, is to read aloud to Caleb in his room, which generally takes us between 20-30 minutes, lights out for him, Naomi and I go into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, then we come into the bedroom we share. She sleeps on Caleb’s old mattress on the floor, nearby ours. She gets into her bed, and I sit at my desk catching up on work while she drifts off to sleep.
There were a lot of little things in between all the big stages, like some waffling back and forth for Caleb after Naomi, between sleeping on his own mattress and sleeping in the big bed (he often got kicked out, not enough room). For a while when Naomi was getting used to laying in bed to go to sleep beside me, without nursing, I used to rub her tummy, which was a good way to get her to go back to sleep if she woke up. For a while, she became extremely interested in always having her belly rubbed, which drove me crazy, because there’s only so long you can rub a belly for. I often had to pretend to fall asleep myself in order to get out of it, which is fairly dangerous when you’re laying in a comfortable bed, snuggled up to a warm toddler, in the dark, in the evening.
This is all to say that perspective is everything. With Caleb, despite how much I loved nursing him to sleep, I couldn’t see what the future held, how we would progress to sleeping independently, and I stressed out quite a bit about nursing him to sleep all the time. With Naomi, knowing that it would eventually end, I embraced the nursing while it worked for me, with full view of the light at the end of the tunnel.
making wild rice 