{"id":536,"date":"2006-07-26T20:35:00","date_gmt":"2006-07-26T20:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2006\/07\/the-man-the-myth-the-god.html"},"modified":"2006-07-26T20:35:00","modified_gmt":"2006-07-26T20:35:00","slug":"the-man-the-myth-the-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/2006\/07\/the-man-the-myth-the-god.html","title":{"rendered":"The Man, the Myth, the God"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I know, I know, &#8220;Thou shalt not have any other gods before me,&#8221; blah blah blah. And that&#8217;s all fine and dandy, but right now at the Sweetie Pie-Doodles household, we are busy erecting an altar to our new holy leader, the great and omnipotent all-powerful <a href=\"http:\/\/www.babycenter.com\/refcap\/7755.html\">Dr. Ferber<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Oh how the mighty weep at the feet of this good doctor. And by mighty, I mean of course, Sweetie Pie. <\/p>\n<p>Those of you with kids know the drill. &#8220;Sleep begets sleep,&#8221; almost all of the books say. As it states in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0449004023\/jennyspage-20\"><i>Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child<\/i><\/a>, &#8220;&#8230;if your child becomes better rested, she will be better able to fall asleep and stay asleep.&#8221; If your child won&#8217;t sleep, put her to bed earlier. Right? Of course right!<\/p>\n<p>So we had our appointment at the Pediatric Sleep Clinic with a lovely young doctor who spent an hour asking us questions and listening to my woes of sleepiness. He gave a quick examination to Sweetie to make sure nothing physical was interfering and then he left to work out a plan for us. We entertained ourselves and shortly after the good doctor returned&#8230; with Dr. Ferber right behind him. (I said later to Adam, &#8220;Didn&#8217;t you feel like you were meeting a rock star!&#8221; to which he looked at me oddly and said, &#8220;Um, no.&#8221;) Dr. Ferber introduced himself (&#8220;Hi, I&#8217;m Dick Ferber&#8221;) and dove right in. I&#8217;d actually heard told that he didn&#8217;t have much of a bedside manner, and I think that, with that in mind, I found him to be a remarkably pleasant, nice person. He explained that Sweetie Pie has been trained to expect a middle of the night meal (or two or three) and that the reason she&#8217;s waking up so often is&#8230; she&#8217;s getting too much sleep. Yes, that&#8217;s right, the child <i>who doesn&#8217;t sleep<\/i> is getting too much sleep. He laid out a plan for us (I have it! In his own handwriting! Our sleep plan for Sweetie Pie! Totally going into the baby book) that involves putting her to sleep at 8:30 at night, <i>waking her up<\/i> at 5:30 a.m. (note he gave us the option of putting her down later and waking her up later, but this is what fit best into our own schedule), giving her a one-hour nap at 8:30 a.m. and a one-hour nap at 12:30 p.m. (and she&#8217;s to be woken from each if she doesn&#8217;t wake on her own after an hour). We are to <i>stop<\/i> bringing her into our bed, as that&#8217;s confusing to her (from what I understood, he is not against cosleeping, just against sleeping in multiple places; basically, she can sleep with us, but only sleep with us; he said for her to fall asleep in the crib, wake up in our bed, wake up again in her crib, has her all turned around).<\/p>\n<p>Radical, huh? Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating (and, yes, that&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.worldwidewords.org\/qa\/qa-pro1.htm\">the proper form of that proverb<\/a>). So? So? Are you all in suspense? What happened?<\/p>\n<p>Well, out of the past seven nights, on five of those nights&#8230; Sweetie Pie has slept from 8:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. without any nighttime wakings. No feedings. No screamings. No nutin&#8217;. Just sleep, blissful sleep. We may have to change her name to Sleepy Pie.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the downside to this is we&#8217;ve had some very rough evenings where she&#8217;s so incredibly tired but we won&#8217;t put her down until 8:30. Waking her up can be quite the challenge. We&#8217;re starting to put her down a little earlier. Dr. Ferber said once her sleep settles in, we add more sleep to either her bedtime or her wake up, in 15-minute increments, until we find just the right amount of sleep for our Pie Pie.<\/p>\n<p>So, let&#8217;s recap. Our daughter is sleeping. Our son is practically eating. We have a new god. <\/p>\n<p>I think we&#8217;re about ready for baby number three, don&#8217;t you? (Adam. Adam! Hey, Adam, come back! I was just kidding!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I know, I know, &#8220;Thou shalt not have any other gods before me,&#8221; blah blah blah. And that&#8217;s all fine and dandy, but right now at the Sweetie Pie-Doodles household, we are busy erecting an altar to our new holy leader, the great and omnipotent all-powerful Dr. Ferber. Oh how the mighty weep at the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jennyandadam.com\/Jenny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}