Separation Anxiety

As a mom, you read up on certain developmental milestones so you get a feel for what to expect. I read a lot during Charlotte's first year of life, and the one thing we seemed to breeze by was separation anxiety and object permanence. Separation anxiety is self-explanatory, but object permanence is basically when your child realizes that you or any other object exists outside of when they see you or it. Charlotte certainly understood the concept as she'd play peek-a-boo, hide her toys and then go find them again, but she never did this with Hubs or I, which we attributed to our consistent drop-off and pick-up schedule at day care.

A week before Christmas, I took Charlotte to day care and experienced our first drop-off meltdown. It through me for a loop but I attributed it to us spending the weekend together and it being hard for her to let go. All of a sudden, "Mommy hold you" became the repeated phrase of the month. Carrying another child and physically feeling tired all of the time didn't make it any easier to feel like I was needed so much.

Bedtime became mommy only as "No Daddy" also became a new favorite phrase. Hubs and I decided to give her what she wanted, assuming it was a phase and hoping that settling in to a new routine would help.

Two weeks later, she decided to stop napping all together, unless it was on me. We've never been a co-sleeping family, mostly because as an infant, Charlotte was very noisy and we were way too paranoid about SIDS to risk having her in our bed. We battled her for 4 days trying to get her to nap on her own, but it was a wash.

Last week, as we all got back into our routines after the holiday break, we hoped she was going to get back on track, too. On Sunday night, she started waking in the middle of the night again, which hasn't happened since we weaned her bink.

We have always done a modified cry-it-out sleep training, and this followed our past tactics. She would wake screaming "Mommy hold you!" and would stand in her crib until we came to get her. Some nights she would wake once, and go back down after seeing one of us, other nights it took a good two hours to get her back down.

Luckily, day care seemed to help get her back into her napping routine, so we were hopeful for what the weekend would bring.

On Friday, I found an Aden + Anais security blanket that I had picked up for her when she was much younger but never really took to. I thought I'd offer it to her to see if it helped her sleep. Friday night came, and she went down without much fuss, and snuggled the blanket, along with a pair of my socks.

I'm not sure where the sock thing came from, but she's hugged the same pair of (clean) reindeer socks since that night, for both nap and bedtime, and hasn't had an issue since (knock on wood...)

I think the need to have something of Mommy's while she slept has given her a sense of security that she really needed and wanted. Every morning when we go in to get her, she has my socks under her arm.

The sock thing sounds SO weird to me, but apparently giving your little ones something of yours can really help with separation anxiety. It's worked for us so far, and we're hoping the phase of needing to sleep with my socks is just that: A phase!