shhhhhhhh

I hear it over and over. You need to make some noise around those babies! Any person who has come to visit us has given us their two cents on the way we allow our children to sleep, with no noise other than their white noise machines gently playing in the background. My husband and I are sleep advocates. We sleep trained our children and have been militant when it comes to establishing routines and healthy sleep. It's a far cry from our relatives who believe babies sleep when they need to sleep, even if it's passed out on a playroom floor. When our kids went to daycare for 6 weeks, they slept horribly. Barely at all and would come home exhausted, cranky, and mad. It's all well and fine if your method teaches your kids to sleep through a freight train I realize the necessity of it all, especially when there are kids of different ages in the same house. But for right now, this is how I want to do it.

My mother in law, my mom, my brother, etc. etc. all think that we need to march a parade through the house when the babies sleep rather than keeping it dark and quiet. We disagree. I look at our silence as a gift. It would be much easier for me to just go about my day while they nap, talk loudly on the phone, slam dishes around but instead I'm a little church mouse. While my mom was visiting, she got rather annoyed that each time she slammed a door closed or her cell phone went off on high-volume it woke a baby up. It's not that I'm training my kids to sleep only when conditions are perfect, I know that they sleep like me.

If a mouse sneezes I will wake up, if an ant is crawling across our wood floor the sound of it's little feet pitter-pattering will jolt me out of the deepest sleep. It's a curse. Not only do I have super-sonic hearing (brag: I score off the charts for my hearing tests, in fact the last time it was tested the test guy said, you hear that? I said, yeah why [with my hand in the air]? He said, no one hears that! you're not supposed to be able to!) BUT I'm also a very light sleeper.

Even more so since the little ones were born. If one of them coughs at 1am, I'm up for at least 2 hours. So anyway, dear people, please get off my back about the way I allow my babies to sleep as peacefully as possible. It won't always be this way but for 15 hours each day, this house needs to remain quiet and dark...their little brains are growing.