Remember the movie Speed? My daughter played the part of the bomb!
Okay, we fell into the trap.
Most children love the soothing motion of a car to help them sleep (if they are not car-sick of course). But our children became very addicted. My oldest was open to a few ways of sleeping: she nursed, naturally, but she could also fall asleep on my shoulder as I rocked her back and forth and listened to Otis Redding or Dire Straits’s “Telegraph Road” (it’s slow, dark, and it lasts about fifteen minutes!). But there were times when the drive in the car was what finally did it for her.
Our youngest has taken things to the extreme. She was better at taking a bottle than her sister, but she’s long past that time. Now that she has weaned, there are only two ways she falls asleep, both involving wheels: the stroller and the car. So now that it’s cold, we have the old stroller from when the oldest was a baby in the house and we go back and forth. Or we hit the road. Sometimes for her afternoon naps, which she hates having to take, she gets mad and wails every time we slow down or are stopped at a traffic light. It’s like we have to get the thing at a steady 55 mph in order to get her to sleep.
As I said, we’re kind of used to this, since there were those nights when I had to take her out to sleep in the car. It’s more challenging at night with two of them, since you have to take two kids out if you are the only parent in the house in the evening. We’re pretty much stuck right now, but the nice thing about having two kids is that you see what the first one has accomplished with such issues as napping and you can apply those ideas and points with the new one. So we know eventually the youngest one will soon find a way to just pass out in front of the TV set (just kidding). But it does bring up an important issue with sleeping and “training” them.
We were not fans of the “cry it out” school. That seemed a bit harsh for an infant. Infants cry because that’s all they know. Many experts nevertheless advocate a gradual approach when they are a certain age, where you don’t respond immediately to the crying, to see if they can get themselves back to sleep. Some tell you that doing that just teaches them not to trust their parents. We always said that we had to do what feels right. Nothing else felt right. So we go on wheels. And if we go too slow, and it’s nap time, we need more SPEED!