Tough Love

I like to sleep with my own personal space.

Things work differently in China.  Boy is that ever a loaded statement.  I was going to say, "They speak Chinese for one…"  … What does this have to do with sleep?

In Sofie's foster care situation, I believe the family slept together on mattresses placed out on the floor together.  She would snuggle up to her foster grandma every night, and she slept peacefully.  Her grandma slept peacefully too.  We met her foster grandma the first day after the exchange, and she was a wreck.  She hadn't slept a second without her Sofie.

In the US, we typically move kids to their own rooms at an early age and use baby monitors to hear what is happening.  If they move around, then we hear it on the monitor and act.

When Sofie moved to the US, we were put in a special situation. What do we do?  We have a child who has been taken from everything she knows, all by herself, and thrust into this new environment.  She wasn't even allowed to bring her favorite toy or sweater.  It was made easy in China because the baby beds provided were smaller than Sofie was.  Oh, and they only provided twin beds in the hotels.  She slept with me.  When we came home, it became a trickier situation.

We worked on it hard for the first few months, and we got her to the point where she would eventually fall asleep in her room.  On most nights, she would make it through the night in her room.  On bad nights, she would wake up in night terrors, and she would come back to our room.  Then I went back to work, and her world was shattered again.  We kept working on it.  We got to a stable point around the same time she went to school for the first time.  Soon after that, I started traveling for work, and then we had frequent, long staying visitors.  There was always change underfoot, and it seemed to be a crutch that allowed her to move back into our room.  

When my last 2 work trips occurred last year (3.5 weeks away in total over 6 weeks), she was allowed to come back into the bedroom full time.  Then I got sick.  Really sick.  I slept in the spare bedroom. She was glad I was home, but since I had been away & was so different when I came back, things were uncertain for her.  Then my husband got a cold, and she moved in with me.  Eventually, we all moved back to the master bedroom.  This is where we are now.

We had a perfect opportunity to move her back with the "whistle" situation.  I hadn't done much more research by this point, and it seemed like having a good motivator would allow her to make the goal.  She wanted one so bad that she tried sleeping in her room by herself that night. It lasted all of 60 minutes before she cried herself to hysteria and moved back to our room.  Eventually, she took a nap in her room a week later, and this qualified as a step forward so she got her whistle.

After this, I looked at what the recommended process is.  The research says we are going to have to do tough love.  They say start by having one of us (probably me) sleep on the floor by her bed for a week.  When she wakes up at night, one of us will be there.  Then we slowly move step by step out of the room until she is doing it by herself.  I don't know if there is ever going to be a good time for this to really start.  We are just going to have to do it.

I haven't resolved myself yet to making it happen.  We will one of these days, and I will relearn how to sleep without little feet in my stomach.  Then we will visit Norway, and it will all start over again.  These circles happen in our lives over and over again, and we just need to get through them.  I hope I am strong enough to be strong for her too.