4. Balance the need to sleep when the baby sleeps with your need to have some "me-time."
"I know that there's logic behind the advice to 'sleep when your baby sleeps,'" says Cathleen, mother of an eight-month-old. "It makes a lot of sense! But that doesn't leave time for R&R activities, whatever they might be for each person. Reading a novel, taking a bubble bath, painting your toenails -- these are luxuries for moms! I gladly forfeit sleep to grab some me-time. It saves my sanity in a way that sleep cannot. Tomorrow I'll just cross my fingers and hope that Miyoko decides that she wants a nice long nap, and I'll lie down and catch a snooze with her then."
5. Don't waste energy by fighting your child's sleep problems in nonproductive ways.
"If I can get five to six hours of sleep a night now, I'm pretty much good to go and I've certainly learned to go with the flow," says Jennifer, 28, mother of 20-month-old Rose.
"That's not to say that I am not sometimes very frustrated when Rose has relapses, but I would say that I am much, much, much better at handling it all now. If I want to enjoy my baby, I have to enjoy all of her, including the night waking, so I just look at it as a normal part of my life. But it took me a long time to get this point. I guess what I've learned is that it's all a matter of perspective. If you look at it as a problem or something bad, then that's where your mindset is at. If you look at it as normal or as part of having a baby, the night waking is much easier to deal with."
Excerpted from Sleep Solutions For Your Baby, Toddler and Preschooler by Ann Douglas. Copyright 2006 by Ann Douglas. Excerpted, with permission by John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
