My Toddler’s Sleep Regression is Killing Me

I think the zombies in the TV show "The Walking Dead" are actually misunderstood. They aren't 'undead,' per se, but rather parents of young children who simply will not sleep at night.

When our son was a baby he simply did not sleep through the night. He would get up every hour, on the hour, crying and yelling. The only thing that could get him to sleep even a little bit was to put him in our bed for the night, relegating me to the couch.

By the time he was 15 months old I was pretty sure I was going to die. My wife and I were up all night, every night, 365 days a year. My heartbeat went haywire and the vision in my left eye was getting blurry. I didn't know what to do.

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Around that very time my wife and I took our first-ever overnight trip away from home to celebrate my birthday in Minneapolis. My dad and his wife offered to watch Charlie, so we warned them about what they were in for. "We can survive one night of this," they said.

That night a miracle happened: he slept through the night. I'm still not sure how it happened but it opened up a glorious stretch of two years in which he slept through the night like a dream.

However, he is back to his old ways at nearly four years old, waking up at all hours of the night crying. Sometimes he says he has bad dreams, sometimes he says he isn't tired... each night is a different scenario that results in me living like a zombie.

We weren't comfortable doing the 'cry it out' method when he was a baby and we definitely can't do it now that he's an articulate, speaking human being.