Meghan Trainor wanted six kids—until she started sleep training her second

Even if you read all the books and talk to all the pros, it’s time to admit that sleep training is so hard. Hell, even if you nail it with your first child, there’s a good chance your subsequent kiddos won’t be so easy, as Meghan Trainor seems to be realizing these days.

In a recent interview with PEOPLE, the singer admits that while sleep training her first baby was a walk in the park, her second is “a fun challenge.”

“I’m the worst at it,” she told the outlet. Of her soon-to-be 3-year-old son Riley, she added, “Riley was such an easy baby that I was like, ‘I’m going to have six. This is whatever.’ Barry’s a fun challenge.”

“He is much harder to sleep train,” Trainor said of 6-month-old Barry. “As the mama, we’ve got different chemicals where when we hear the baby cry, we hear it… literally, it’s like science. We hear it way differently than other people can hear it.”

“I remember one time when Bar was really young, he would have these colic moments where he couldn’t stop crying,” she recalled. “And he was inside the house, deep on the other side, and I was outside the house, far away.”

“And I was like, ‘Do you guys hear that? He’s screaming right now.’ And they were like, ‘No.’ But I had super Mom-hearing ears, and I was like, ‘My baby’s upset. I’m going to go find him.'”

Trainor does have a point: according to a 2017 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, maternal brains adapt to be more closely attuned to their baby’s cries. In fact, pregnancy changes the architecture of the brain for at least two years, with this heightened closeness occurring in mothers around the world.

But when it comes to sleep training, it seems Trainor is all about letting her husband, Spy Kids star Daryl Sabara, take the reins. “My husband’s been working on that more than I am.”

Here’s hoping baby Barry’s sleep schedule adjusts soon so that everyone in the Trainor-Sabara household can get some quality z’s ASAP.