This is what happens when children sleep through the night

Today, I:

-woke up just because. Not because I heard Lea crying. Just because my body was ready to wake up.

-had time to wash my face and brush my teeth before having to be on duty.

-felt like a human being when I took Lea to school (on time!) and chatted with some friends there.

-got a watermelon tea instead of the emergency fill-my-body-with-caffeine large coffee I normally go for on Monday mornings.

-was enormously productive in finishing a draft of a big essay I've been working on. I had brain power. I felt like a writer.

-worked in my garden with great pleasure. Finished the first stage of completely redoing it for summer.

-kept my cool during the usual grouch-fest that is lunch. Got Lea down for a nap.

-had no reason to stagger to my own bed while she slept, which is what I've done for a year now. Instead, I came downstairs and did the lunch dishes.

-did 30-minute yoga! Hello, Rodney Yee. It's been such a long time!

Wow! I know that might look like absolutely nothing to most grown-ups in the universe, but I've seriously been running on fumes for way too long. Even though Lea's wakeups were always very brief, and even though most nights, I was getting 8 total hours of sleep, those 8 hours were split into 2- and 3-hour chunks. Every. Night. I really didn't have a stretch of sleep longer than 4 hours for over a year, I'm pretty sure. This takes a toll. Sleep is about literally repairing your body, and it just doesn't work real well if you're never getting a long enough stretch.

I was seriously at the end of my rope last month, so on the advice of my friend Lindsay, Brian and I read up on the Dr. Jay Gordon method of nightweaning. It's geared toward families who co-sleep, which we don't do, so we had to amend it a bit, but holy moly. It pretty much immediately worked. I think she slept 10 hours on the third night.

But here's the thing: I'm not saying I wish we'd tried earlier. In a way, we did try, in January when I couldn't nurse overnight for 10 days because of medication. We thought that would be the logical end to night nursing, no turning back. We even gave it an extra week after I was off the meds. No luck. Lea was still frantic and freaked out and impossible to console during most wake-ups. She just wasn't ready. So we went back to the old patterns.

What made it different this time? Well, first of all, Lea's daytime eating habits improved hugely. Her diet is much better, and her food intake much greater, than it was then. Secondly, and I think almost more importantly, is that her receptive language skills are much more developed, meaning that when we come into her room and say, "You're ok, sweetie, I'm here, you're safe, do you want a cup of water?" It means something to her. We have a greater array of ways to soothe her, and she gets it.

Anyway, I can safely say that Lea is nightweaned and sleeping through almost every night. Hallelujah. And guess what else? She's still napping, almost three hours later. She stirred once, started chirping a little bit, and put herself back to sleep. She never did this before. Obviously developing that skill overnight has translated beautifully into naptime (at least today).