It’s hard to be a parent these days. You’re bombarded with advice from all directions, and everyone has opinions about how you should be doing things.

When it comes to babies’ sleep, I keep reading and hearing that it’s important that the baby learns to fall asleep in the cot, and not in dad’s arms or while being rocked by mom. “Baby should be put down drowsy but awake.” Any help you give is labelled a “prop” and is BAD. The underlying message is always “once you start a habit, it’ll stick, and you’ll be sorry a year from now!”.

But no one says the same about other aspects of taking care of a baby. No one says “Don’t feed him – he needs to learn to eat on his own” or “Don’t change her nappy, or she’ll get used to it and then you’ll be doing it forever”.

Why do they have such a different view on sleep, then? (“They” being all those people who dole out advice in books and on the internet.) I guess parents’ comfort is the only reason. No one minds changing dirty nappies 7 times a day, but parents do mind being woken in the middle of the night. So they hope for a quick fix.

(Besides, a book that says “don’t worry, things will sort themselves out” is not going to be a bestseller. If, on the other hand, the author claims that the baby’s current behaviour can and should be fixed using their unique method, this can sell lots of books. And of course first-time parents are easy targets… it’s easy to make us worry that we’re doing things wrong.)

But the more I see Ingrid develop, the less I believe in this view. She is small and needs help. Just as she cannot change her own nappy or put food in her mouth, she cannot go to sleep on her own. And that’s OK.

Nothing is fixed, and no habit will be hard to change, because everything about her changes all the time. There is almost nothing about her that is the same now as it was three months ago. In fact I can’t think of a single thing. She eats differently, sleeps differently, poops differently, cries differently, plays differently.

So I’ve finally pretty much stopped listening to all this advice, and stopped worrying about her sleeping habits. (Don’t tell me “I told you so”! I know. But I’m good at worrying.) While we’re not as rested as we could be, none of us is collapsing from exhaustion. And things are getting steadily better, with the help of time, practice, love and common sense, without the need of any methods.

I’ve never quite understood the appeal of games like The Sims or online worlds such as Second Life. I tried The Sims for a while but couldn’t see the point of it. It isn’t a proper game since there are hardly any rules or goals, and no real challenge. It’s like real life but on the screen, at a distance. I’ve not even tried Second Life because it just seems like more of the same. Anything I could do in Second Life, I could do in the first one, and better. (Well, the one advantage of SL might be that I wouldn’t have to leave my desk to do it.)

Today I found an essay expressing and explaining this all much better than I have ever been able to.

I used to weep envious buckets watching whatshisname in Close Encounters of the Third Kind being taken off-world to the absolutely not here anymore by those delightful doe-eyed creatures, and Second Life seemed to offer a way of doing this without the hassle of the striving, making mountains out of mashed potato, quest thing. So I signed up.

The problem turned out to be (as it must) that Second Life is organised and inhabited by beings from the real world who have by definition very little experience of being anywhere or any way else. Being virtual is not very different from being real because the virtual place and its beings are controlled by the same old us as always.

Sad but true. For a “second life” that’s really different, we need aliens or a fifth dimension. Or books.

Well what do you know. The medium miracle was followed by the long-awaited major miracle within a week.

Last weekend Eric was unwell so I was in charge of Ingrid and never got my long catch-up nap, which I had been looking forward to. Then Tuesday and Wednesday (yesterday) Ingrid woke me at 5 and then again at 6. So I started yesterday rather tired.

So tired that when it was time for Ingrid’s first nap I tried putting her to sleep in the bed, hoping that I could get at least a quick nap. The previous attempts have been utter failures and I have given up after 20 minutes of screaming. This time took her to the bedroom, lay her down on her side and rocked her through 15 minutes of intermittent crying. By the end of it she was deep asleep, and a few minutes later so was I. Wonderful.

Much encouraged by this success I tried it again today (having been woken at 6 again, and feeling rather under the weather due to some sort of bug I’ve caught) and to my great surprise it worked again! We both slept for over an hour, which is more than she’s ever managed in the pram. Pure bliss.

Laying her on the side appears to be the key. When she wakes early from her night sleep (early = before 10pm when I give her a last feed) I always find that she has slipped onto her back. I’m not sure if that happens before she wakes (and causes her waking) or after (because she starts kicking and squirming). In order to get her back to sleep I need to shift her back into a side-lying position and then rock her until she calms enough to realise that she can use her hands for sucking, and not just for angry waving and hitting. After that it only takes a few minutes for her to fall asleep.

It’s not a foolproof method and doesn’t work every time, or I wouldn’t have gotten up after 45 minutes of crying this morning. But it’s far better than what we had before. I can’t help wishing that I’d realised this earlier… but I’m really happy it works so often now!