BABY STEPS: One more step toward big-boyhood

Well, we at the Pind house have accomplished a miracle. My son, after 2 1/2 years of being up at least twice a night and taking an hour or more to go to sleep, is now able to go to bed all by himself. All it took was one week of horrible screams and cries and he is now a self-sufficient sleeper.

We have tried for more than a year to get Cooper to go to sleep and to sleep all night. Nothing we did seemed to work. When he was 14 months old we switched to the toddler bed, thinking that if he were a "big boy," then he would sleep.

The toddler bed was not our friend. Cooper is such a crazy sleeper that he kept falling out or getting stuck in the bars. Our next step was a twin bed, but when we went to price them, we realized they weren't any wider than a toddler bed, so we decided to get him a full-size bed.

After six months in the cool "big boy" dinosaur bed, he still wouldn't go to sleep alone or sleep all night. Max would lie in bed with him for hours trying to get him to settle down and go to sleep.

One particularly hard night, after Cooper took three hours to fall asleep, Max came up with a plan. We talked about it and he decided he could wean Cooper off of only going to sleep if he was next to him.

He started out the next night reading Cooper a story like always, but instead of turning off the light and lying next to him until he fell asleep, he sat in a chair across the room. The first night, Coop didn't even fight it and went to sleep after about 20 minutes. The next night, it took a little longer, about 30 minutes. On the third night, it was like a switch and he went straight to sleep after 10 minutes.

Of course, this made Max think he was awesome, so after a week of sitting in the chair and Cooper going to sleep in 30 minutes or less, he decided he could just leave the room and let him do his thing. As you can image, that went over real well.

The first night of Cooper going to sleep alone was one of the worst nights of motherhood that I have had so far. The only one that comes close is the second night after we brought him home from the hospital, when he only slept two hours the whole night.

This time, Cooper screamed -- not cried, but screamed -- for two straight hours. He would take 10-minute breaks to catch his breath, or, as we believe, to trick us into thinking he had given up and fallen asleep. The second night was better -- he only cried and it only lasted about 90 minutes. The third night, he thought he could pull a fast one on us and sneak out of his room. I heard the creak of the hallway floorboards, looked over, and the ninja was crawling out of his room. He just looked up at me and grinned, and Max picked him up and put him back in bed.

Finally, after a week of fussing and trying to sneak out of his room, Cooper finally just kissed us good night and went to sleep on his own. Of course all night we were waiting for the other shoe to drop, but he went right to sleep and slept all night, and kept right on doing it for another week.

Three weeks later, I am pretty certain (fingers crossed) that he is finally able to put himself to sleep and we are finally well on our way to being a big boy. Next up: using the big boy potty, because I am so, so tired of buying diapers!

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Kristen Pind, a native of small-town Gower, Mo., came to Southeast Missouri State University with big dreams of being the next Katie Couric or Diane Sawyer. She never thought that by age 25, she'd be married with a baby and living in Cape Girardeau. Keep up with Kristen's adventures as a first-time mom -- one who's still a girl trying to figure out how her own life fits together. Turns out, she's living a dream she never knew she had, and loving every minute of it. Kristen invites moms of all types to find her "Baby Steps" page on Facebook.