All right, my blog wasn’t around when I was being tortured by Rose’s bedtime routine. The snack, songs, stories, nursing, duets with John, blanky fixing, refixing—my friend Ellie described it as baroque. Longer and longer, more and more elaborate. . .aghh.

David’s has never been that bad. Partially, because David is a really easy going kid and partially because I refused.

Things were going ok for awhile, 20 minutes of nursing and he’d fall asleep. I wasn’t complaining though I knew the whole stack of cards would fall down when we took out the nursing part.

That day came.

David just stopped nursing to sleep. He still wants to nurse some, but lies there staring at me with wide open eyes. So after the initial 20 minutes I’d have to pat his back, lie on the floor holding his hand through the bars of the crib, stand up again and do some more patting, try to sneak away once his eyes were closed only to hit the sqeaky floorboard, pretend I hadn’t really been about to head out the door, and this would go on forever.

After just three days of this, I got wise. I nursed a bit, pulled up his blankies, turned on the music box, patted for five, and said, “Good-night, sweet dreams, I love you.” Then I walked out the door.

He screamed for 10 minutes. I came back did a little patting and he went to sleep. Repeat the next night, he yelled for two and went to sleep. And after that no yelling at all.

No, I’m serious. I walk out the door when he’s awake, and he goes to sleep.

When my mom was putting him to bed, he crawled into his crib, lay down and said, “Blanky.” Then he went to sleep.

Now, this is not a polemic in favor of sleep training. Every family has to do what works for them. I’m just saying knowing the bedtime routine is going to work totally rocks.