At this point, my advice is to come up with ways to treat yourself. You give all of yourself to your baby, it’s important to mentally decompress, maintain your sense of self, and maintain your relationships, whether that’s with a partner, family, friends, or all of the above.
My wife and I, for example, clung to dinner-and-movie rituals. One night a week, we’d either order takeout or I’d make a huge pile of chicken wings and we’d just let a movie or show wash over us. HBO usually has a good show with a new episode on Sundays—Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, and White Lotus come to mind as recent weekly appointment viewing. An underrated part of Marvel’s success is you can throw on anything they have to offer and enjoy it without thinking too hard. Do I have any takes on Loki? Probably, but I haven’t bothered to think those thoughts yet—I just enjoyed the show while making jokes with the love of my life as buffalo sauce dripped down my chin.
It’s bliss when your kid figures out how to sleep, and it’s worth allowing yourself some time to appreciate how far you’ve come since the days nervously placing a half-swaddled one-week-old in a bassinet next to your bed. Congratulate yourself. You taught a human being how to sleep.
BONUS ROUND: Your Kid Can Climb Out Of The Crib Now
Ah damn, we have to fast forward again. Turns out, kids grow. Like, their legs and arms get longer, they get more mobile … and they start climbing out of their crib.
One day, I put the baby down for a nap, and then went to my office. My wife was working in the other room. I had the baby monitor, and felt like I heard the baby a little closer than I should’ve. His little pitter-pattering feet are pretty unmistakable on our hardwood floors. Then I heard my wife walking into the kitchen and yelp “Hi baby! Why are you out of bed?”
This mischievous child I sired had finally gotten big enough to climb all the way out of his crib, even with the mattress on the lowest setting. Now he was happily prancing about the house. We asked how he got out and he didn’t even say a word, just gleefully scampered over to climb back in and show us exactly how easy it was to climb out.
So some two-plus years after we’d finally gotten sleep training down, we had to convert the crib to a toddler bed, which comes with a whole other set of brand-new sleep training strategies. That’s a topic for another column, though. Parenting is an ever-evolving mess of complicated adjustments. For now, just focus on the small victories.
Chris Corlew is the father of precisely one (1) child, and that is his only qualification for this column. If you really run out of options for getting your kid to sleep, feel free to try playing his extremely boring music or even worse podcast. Yell at him about how none of this helped on Twitter.