I’ve done that, though it was everyone from little baby sister to nieces/nephews/whoever I was babysitting. I’m almost embarassed to say I do that with my cats on occasion, too; they do the ‘dead kitty’ sprawl so well sometimes I have to make sure 
My son is 22 and when he is at home I still have that same urge to check to make sure he is alive. But I’m afraid to go into his room without warning because there is a 22 year old man sleeping in there.
Then ask him to check your son.
With any luck, he’ll be poking him.
My wife still checks on our six (nearly 7) year old son when he’s sleeping. I don’t. I did it when he was an infant. I think most parents do, with their first.
This. Celtling was sooo hard to get to sleep. Holy Moses. And she never slept more than four hours at a time. . . I may have mentioned that around here once or twice before :: twitch ::
I would never have done anything to risk waking her unless I was absolutely certain that her life depended upon it.
But yes, even now (she’s five) sometimes I look - then look again - then go over and watch for a while - then my heart starts racing - and just when visions of ambulance lights begin to dance in my head - she takes a deep breath - and I kiss her little head and go pass out for a bit.
I agree that it’s not just the lack of movement, sometimes they really do get pale and waxy looking when they are deeply asleep. :eek:
Nap? What are these “naps” of which you speak? My daughter didn’t sleep during the day until she was four months old. In her first week of life she was literally awake 18 hours a day. FML.
Enjoy it while it lasts, she’ll get you sooner or later.
When my kid was first born, I swear I could hear him stop breathing in the middle of the night and it would wake me up. I would proceed to sleep on the hard wood floor next to his crib so that I could hear better if he stopped breathing.
Sometimes i would poke him or touch his hand to see if he was warm. But mostof the time I would put my ear right next to his face to see if I could hear him breathing.
I used to consider myself a rational man.
Mine are 15, 12, 6 and 4 months. With the newest addition, I had to check his breathing all the time. Now it’s only when he’s been asleep for awhile and I’m thinking…he should be up…why isn’t he up yet…he doesn’t normally sleep this long…oh ok, he’s breathing…maybe I should take a nap…
Yes, I did all of the above things, as well as turning the baby monitor to 11 so I could hear every rustle of the sheets and creak of the crib.
Oh, God. When Widget was tiny, she used to do this eeping thing when she was asleep - on every breath out, she’d do this tiny little two-tone hum. It was totally adorable and very reassuring.
Except for the 1% of the time when she DIDN’T DO IT and I’d go in to check on her and she’d be doing totally silent breathing and OH SWEET JESUS and I’d poke her and she’d make this outraged squawk and I would creep away trying not to throw up with leftover terror.
She’s almost three, and I still sometimes stick my hand in front of her mouth to feel her breathing, just to make sure.
I miss the eeping noise.
Damn! Those are the most recalcitrant quadruplets ever!
My thoughts too.
I still check my son (6 years old) every night. My daughter (2.5) I don’t check - she wakes up way too easily. Seriously, if there’s a change in the Force in her room (i.e., someone breathes, even if they’re totally silent), she’ll know.
I will crank the monitor every so often, but only go check on the little guy right before I go to bed. Just make sure that the monitor is turned back down when you go in…
My wife and I sometimes say “let’s wake him up!”, but we never follow through.
My 5 month old daughter is like that. Just last night, after she had drifted off in my arms, letting me feel briefly excited at the prospect at an evening to myself, her father, feeling all benign and sentimental because he was on his way to the pub, the lucky bastard, came over to coo admiringly at her. Of course the little darling immediately woke up - it would have been most impolite of her to ignore her adoring public - and it took me another 4 hours to get her back to sleep again.
At times like that I sometimes wish I’d got a kitten instead. No-one’s ever spent 4 hours failing to persuade a kitten to go to sleep.
I imagine that I will most certainly do this. I poke my belly now if I haven’t felt him wiggle in a while. Hell, I do it to my husband - if his breathing gets really quiet, I’ll nudge him or try to feel his Heartbeat or chest rising.
I have a pic of my Dad doing this.
The Other Uncle once poked the Kidlet when the Kidlet was blissfully asleep, and he did it with his usual delicacy: the baby woke up royally howling, but not as loud as his mother; the main reason TOU did not get tossed out of a window is that he’s got over a foot on his sister, The Proud Mommy.
But they had those walkies, and any time The Kidlet made any noise, his mom and The Other Grandma would rush there. It took them a couple of months to realize that “the kid has made a noise” was not a signal to run to the kid’s room, grab him up and start checking what could be wrong, as this process invariably produced an extremely cranky baby.
The Kidlette sleeps like a log and always has. In the words of The Proud Daddy, “she wiggles a bit, finds the position, goes to sleep… eight hours later, you look in and she’s in the exact same position.” It took a while to learn how to deal with a baby who went from hours of no noise to a “feed me! NOW!” wail, but as The Proud Mommy says, “it’s not like you can complain about a baby who sleeps like a log and do it with a straight face.”
This may be the sweetest thread ever. (If you wrote a “Journal,” I’d read it.)
I used to set the alarm. Not for their feeding times. So I could go in and check on 'em.