12 posts tagged “sleep”
Well, just in case I had forgotten what nighttime wakings were like, ReRe had me up between 4-6am this morning. He woke up at around 4:19am, and thought it was time to get up, and started going though his morning routine: ask if Daddy is still home; inform ME that that Daddy is sleeping (no sh**, lucky bast**d); tell me his diaper is wet; demand to be picked up; request his "Crocky shoes" (fuzzy-lined Crocs that he wears around our drafty house); and that we go downstairs to see "Elmo bus". (There is a 5 minute clip in a Play with Me Sesame episode where Elmo makes, and then twice crashes, a cardboard bus; henceforth, anything on TV is referred to as Elmo Bus). I tried rocking him down, and almost succeeded a few times, but then had to concede defeat, and we went downstairs around 5:09am to have some warm milk with honey. That seemed to do the trick, and we headed back upstairs. I don't know exactly when he fell asleep on me, but I had him back in his bed, and me in mine, at 6:11am. He then heard his Dad get up and leave, and was up, for good, at 6:50am. Needless to say, we watched a little Elmo Bus before day care today.
So I'm on my 3rd cup of coffee (avec mon Mate), and it's barely 11am, and I'm going to make another pot. In the meantime, could someone explain this to me:
I saw these at Aldo when I was shopping for summer shoes the other day. I get that the platform is covered by the leather (or pleather, as the Aldo case may be) but does that really necessitate the toe pointing in the air? I mean, does anyone else find this so distracting so as to detract from the rest of the shoe? Or is this the bellwhether of things to come? Since they are invariably a designer knock-off, could someone please point me towards the person/collection responsible for these shoes that will not leave my mind? I'm scared that I love them. Or is this just a reaction to having purchased the most ridiculously sensible shoes ever?
First of all, I want to apologise to anyone who is tired of hearing about my son's sleep issues. I'm sure all those Voxy folks out there have much more engaging topics. And this post offers no real conclusions, just realizations such as the fact that my son doesn't have issues; his parents do. From what the books have told me so far, my son has no sleep disorders, and is well within statistical normalcy when it comes to his age and sleep habits. He takes one 1-2 hour nap in the middle of the day with very little fuss, and is in bed, with very little fuss, from around 7pm-7am, with most often one wake between 3-5am, when he stands up and cries loudly until one of us comes into the room. The problem is that 1) his mother is knackered if she has to get up even once for an extended period during the night, and 2) his father works ungodly hours, and many days reeeeeeally needs his sleep. so we're hesitant to let him cry for extended periods during the night. Here are the other things I've concluded so far:
1) We've been very consistent with schedules and routines since he was born, and these have held up well. He never fights the routine, and sometimes even goes up the stairs himself to get them started.
2) He is likely getting enough sleep, i.e. 12-14 hours per 24-hour period.
3) Where we have issues are around self-soothing. We have tried to give him the time and space to self-soothe, have followed different methods, but all result in the same thing: standing-up crying until he is either picked up are laid back down in the crib and shush-patted back to sleep. While he's being patted, he does sort of hum to himself, which I think is a self-soothe, and he does have a favourite sleep position that he gets into. But his bedtime and naptime routines still include rocking and cuddles, altho of much shorter duration than before, and more often than not, a bottle.
4) I think, by following a gentle method, and not letting him cry for extended periods, we may have likely set up what one of the books calls an 'intermittent reinforcement schedule', which means by being inconsistent (i.e. intermittent in our responses), we have given rise to the possibility that mommy and daddy will come if he keeps crying, so he will always keep crying, no matter how long we leave him. Gawd, I will never bring this topic up in a mom's group; can you get more controversial?
I will keep reading for the next few days, waiting for a eureka moment, but I'm just about ready to throw in the towel and just accept my son's sleep patterns for what they are: statistically normal, and improving over time, with set backs related to teething, sickness, discomfort from weather changes, and the fact that he's a growing toddler.
(Gross info warning!!) We're also trying to deal with another reality when it comes to self-soothing - the last 3 times we've left him to self-soothe his way back to sleep, he's gotten up crying, tried to climb out of the crib, and gotten his knee stuck between 2 slats, and then started screaming in pain. We bought a Jolly Jumper brand mesh bumper to thread thru the slats, so that hopefully that would keep him from doing that, and when we opened it, it had what looked like blood stains on it. Sorry to gross you out, but that about did me in. So yet again, he's getting rocked into dopey-ness, and then shush-patted.
Could this be the epiphany I've been waiting for? That the best thing I could do for our collective sleep is to accept the way things are and continue comforting my son back to sleep during the night with a little something to drink, a clean diaper, and some cuddling and rocking? This morning we went for a walk around the neighbourhood, and I had a talk with my husband about this. He agreed that, no matter how completely exhausted he is, he won't demand any more sleep plans or sleep coaches at 3 o'clock in the morning. And in an excellent example of not being part of the long-term solution, he fell asleep with our son while putting him down for his nap. Needless to say, this won't stop happening, and is indeed part of my son's regular life, these naps with daddy. My fear is when he goes to daycare, whether he will get the comforting he needs, whether he will quickly adapt, or whether we've set him up for disaster.
OMG, I would rather be posting about anything other than my son's sleep problems, but I am knackered, and didn't even have a drink last night, and can't think about much else at the moment. Last night was one of the few nights when my husband was available (i.e. not working or about to work at some ungodly hour) to put our son down for the night, and do the night shift. All was good until about 2:30am, when lil'ReRe woke up, and didn't go to sleep for over 2 hours. So neither of us got mcuh sleep. It was 2 hours of crying, most of it after he's been fed, tucked in, and lying in child's resting pose, his favourite sleeping position. We're not sure that he isn't already asleep, and crying in his sleep, cuz he's done this before as well. So we're really at a loss, since the books we've read don't address how to get a baby to stop crying once it seems they're already asleep. I know, it sounds crazy.
The book we've used up to this point, the No Cry Sleep Solution, has 6 levels of intervention, from picking the child up and rocking them fully to sleep to comforting them from outside their room, and we've diligently followed their method, but can't get past rocking him into a light slumber, then sush-patting him once he's in the crib (level 3, I think). Anything less than this and he's up and trying to get out of the crib. This author's method did help us make some progress, but not to the place we'd like to be, which is him being able to comfort himself back to sleep. If he isn't sleepy enough to fall asleep, and we're not shush-patting him, he's standing up and crying in no time. Once he's standing up, we usually intervene, since he's managed on a number of occasions, including last night, to wedge his knee between the slats in an attempt to climb out of the crib. This results in screaming pain that I heard from the basement at 4:40am this morning, and flew up the stairs, running headlong into my husband who was on his way into his room. I watched on the baby monitor as my husband carefully extricated ReRe from his predicament in the dark (we got one of the video monitors so we could see whether he was actually up or not, since we had gone in some times to check, and only then did he get up). This propensity for self-injury (and one base-jumping episode, of which I am not yet ready to speak) has kept us from letting him cry for very long at a go, so I've been resistant to trying methods that allow babies to cry to very long intervals. This author does have a book for Toddlers and Pre-Schoolers, but since her method hasn't worked entirely for us, I'm not sure I want to continue with it.
I'm going to the library today to see if they have Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, which I've had recommended to me a number of times. I'm just afraid that at 15 months, we may be too late.
The weird thing is, for the entire week we were out west, where he slept in my sister's Pack'n'Play in 4 different places, he slept thru the night every night, save the one night of camping when it was too cold and I put him in my sleeping bag. I couldn't rock him, since I didn't have a portable rocking chair, and he fell asleep with just one round of me singing Pretty Ponies. I hate to think that the solution is to shlep my son across the province, put him in a different bed in a different room every night, and sing to him in my mono-note voice. This could get expensive, unless the CBC picked it up as a reality series......
Forget all these Putumayo CDs I've been shilling, it looks like the Kurds have the right music to put babies to sleep.
The past week has been a reeeally long week. lil'ReRe has had a cold, which then passed on to his father, and then to me. He has slept terribly, and in a few ways, digressed a few months: whenever he feels me about to lie him down in the crib, he arches his back in almost a spasmodic way, forcing himself awake so that he can fully witness and protest the coming injustice, rather than just accepting it and drifting off to sleep on his right side, clutching the blanket, as is his new habit. But in other ways he's progressing quicker than we realize: he has starting rolling over and squirming around in the crib without making much noise, so that by the time he cries for us, he's already done a lap of the crib, and has the blanket and soother wrapped about him, and a limb or two caught in the slats. Last night, I turned on our video monitor at around 2:30am to see if he was awake, and nearly jumped out of bed at the night vision image of my baby's face looking right into the camera. Damn that was creepy. Then, this morning, he somehow managed to pull himself up in his crib, reach over and grab the baby monitor off the little shelf next to his crib, and wrestle it into the crib. My husband found him lying on his side, his arms and legs wrapped around the monitor, as he gnawed on it. Either he really needed something to teethe on, or my baby was making a comment on the invasion of his privacy. They are supposed to start demonstrating preferences at 8 months.......
Ok, seriously this time, I'm really going to write about what has helped lil'ReRe sleep better, and buy extension, allowed me a few more hours of sleep too. As I mentioned in the original post, lil'ReRe has started sleeping for longer periods of time. Not every night, but enough that we feel we're turning a corner. Now, we did a few things to help make his room a little more condusive for sleep: we installed a black-out blind over his window, and put the humidifier in his room. But we also followed the plan in the No Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley. The first thing we needed to do was to create a log of his naps, his beadtime routine, and his night wakings. We had already developed a daytime and bedtime routine, so the issue was really trying to help lil'ReRe sleep through the night. And creating a log showed us just how desperate the reality was: he was waking an average of 8 times a night (between 6pm and 6am) and at the most, only sleeping 2.75 hours at a time. No wonder I felt like death warmed over. So we filled out the logs, and then reviewed what Pantley refers to as "Sleep Solutions", and chose the ones that worked for us (the fact that she gave us a choice was one of the reasons her approach is working for us):
- Get Yourself Ready - examine our own goals and needs. Do we need lil'ReRe to sleep 12 hours straight? No. Do we need him to sleep for longer periods, and learn to fall asleep on his own? Yes. We don't believe things will just get better, even if we don't try to change them. I'm totally OK with letting go of our private time together during the night; I don't expect that they will disappear completely, and they leave me stressed and anxious. (Did I mention I'm an insomniac? Every waking is another chance for me to just be awake for the rest of the night. Of this, I can let go.) Expectations are realistic, so we can proceed.
- Get Your Baby Ready - He's always well fed during the day, and before bed. We've taken steps to make his bedroom more comfortable (the only remaining problem is temperature, which in an apartment, is pretty hard to control, but we do our best).
- Develop a bedtime routine - Been doing this since day one. Was harder to train his other caregivers to get, and stay, with the program.
- Esablish an early bedtime - Done and done. Except for last night. Got stuck in traffic after a late appointment in the west end. lil'ReRe let me know loud and clear that he was not pleased with this change in routine. For 45 minutes. Loud and Clear. Gotcha.
- Follow a flexible yet predictable daytime routine - We can actually thank the Baby Whisperer for this. We've been following her E.A.S.Y. method (a routine cycle, not a schedule, of eating, activity, sleeping, and then You time, which is when I blog) ever since we came home from the hospital. Her approach worked for us for the day, but not the night.
- Have your baby take regular naps - this is taken care of thru the E.A.S.Y. thang.
- Help your baby fall asleep without your help - Ay, there's the rub! We've rocked lil'ReRe to sleep ever since he was born. I've got this crazy comfortable rocking chair, and there is nothing I love more than rocking his and singing him songs, and playing him the Kenny Loggins lullaby CD (hey, don't laugh, how many other lullaby CD's cover Paul Simon, Ricky Lee Jones and John Lennon?). So we've gotten him into this habit, and it's one that I love. Except for the fact that every time he woke up during the night, he couldn't fall back asleep on his own. What I like about this book is that it provides a six-phase approach to getting your baby to sleep on their own, rather than going straight to crying it out. Without getting into too much detail, it basically moves from rocking them completely to sleep, to only partially asleep and comforting them in their crib, to placing them in their crib awake and comforting them, comforting them without picking them up, etc. The author gives you leeway, too, to go back a phase if your baby is just not going to go to sleep without a little more comforting. Why I need an author's permission to do this, I don't know, but it's probably our culture's obsession with 'expertise', and all the stuff I've read about how, if your baby has bad habits, it's all your fault. I need a little leeway in order to follow my own instincts, and so that I don't fixate on following a 'method', which is often a recipe for failure.
- Use music or sound as a sleep cue - my little boy will forever get drowsy at the sound of Kenny Loggins' voice.
- Change your baby's sleep associations - This one if for babies who need to suck themselves to sleep. lil'ReRe doesn't need to breastfeed to sleep, but he does use a pacifier to fall asleep. At least with me. According to my husband, he never uses one, so at least I know it's possible. I'll have to observe his technique some day. I'm sure it involves medication. Changing this isn't a huge priority for me at the moment; once we work on the other issues, we'll deal with this one. The author's perspective on feeding babies to sleep is different than most. She feels that this is only a problem when it doesn't fit into our busy lives, and isn't inherently wrong. For those who want to change this association, tho, she provides a rather gentle approach to do so.
So, we made the changes suggested in the book, but also came across another change by accident: lil'ReRe falls asleep best lying on his right side. I think I was trying to lie him down one day on his back, and the blanket was under him, and as I was rolling him to the side to get it out from under him, he spontaneously fell asleep. It was bizarre. I was, like, what the....? So the routine became rocking him until he was drowsy, giving him the pacifier, and lying him on his side in the crib. The room is darker, the air easier to breathe. And wouldn't you know it, something in there worked. Now, he usually only wakes two or three times a night. Some nights aren't so great, and he'll wake five or six times, but this is still progress. I'm getting more sleep, and feeling a bit more human.
So I left off telling you that our lil'ReRe is sleeping much better these days, but I didn't explain why. Of for that matter, I didn't describe why this is so important for me. Those of you with children don't need an explanation. For those of you without children, this obsession by new parents about how long their baby sleeps may seem bizarre. But the lack of sleep, and the frustration (and sometimes despair) at not knowing when you will ever have a full night's sleep again (heck, even a half-night's sleep again) can be overwhelming.
Here is an experiment for all those childless people who, for some odd reason, would like to see what it is like to have a baby who doesn't sleep (or for those who possibly need a stronger form of birth control). In order to have the full experience, repeat the experiment every night for at least seven months. You will need the following supplies: a soundtrack to an old kung-ku movie (with lots of crashing cymbals and high-pitched singing) on a portable music device; an old-fashioned alarm clock with the bells on top; a 15lb sack of flour; an air horn; a back scratcher; week-old oatmeal with milk, a soup spoon and a bean bag.
1. At around 7pm on the first night, put on your headphones and put on the kung-fu soundtrack. Turn it up to slightly above ear-piercing. Pick up the flour sack and walk around your house for 45 minutes. Put the flour sack down somewhere, and turn off the soundtrack. Set the alarm for 1 hour. In the meantime, clean your house, answer all your phone and e-mail messages, cook and eat dinner, and do the dishes and laundry.
2. When the alarm goes off, put the soundtrack back on, pick up the flour sack, and walk around your house for another half an hour. For added effect, blow the air horn a couple times. After 30 minutes, put down flour sack, turn off music, and try to go to bed. Set alarm for 2 hours (I'm being generous).
3. When the alarm goes off, put on music, pick up flour sack, and walk around the house again for another 30 minutes. With the back scratcher, hook your lower lip and yank a couple times. Put down flour sack, blow air horn. Pick up flour sack for another 15 minutes. Put sack down, turn off soundtrack, set alarm for another two hours. Try to go to sleep.
4. When alarm goes off, put on music and pick up flour sack. With the soup spoon, flick a couple spoonfuls of the oatmeal onto your face and shoulder. Without putting the flour sack down, clean yourself off. If you must put down the flour sack, blow the air horn. Walk around with sack for another 20 minutes, put it down, turn of music, set alarm for 2 hours, try to sleep.
5. When alarm goes off, go to the flour sack, but before you pick it up, hit yourself in the face with the bean bag a couple times. Repeat step 2.
6. When the alarm goes off, greet the morning with a smile. It's another glorious day of parenthood.
Something very shocking happened the night before last, and I'm not sure how to deal with it. My baby slept for 6.5 hours straight. Waking only once. And last night, he only work twice. This is unprecedented. He never sleeps for more than 3 hours at a go, and lately, he was shortening that to maybe 2 hours. There have been some mornings when he was up every hour after 3am. Now, this didn't just happen out of nowhere, we actually have done a number of things lately to try to help him sleep better, but I just don't think I can actually believe that they have worked. I think I am going to need a few more nights like this to actually feel like we've been successful. To be honest, it's hard for me to feel successful when I still feel wrecked (and I mean like in a ship wreck, in pieces, smashed on the rocks, my formerly coherent parts broken to bits and floating away with the flotsem.....)
But I digress.....so, what have we done to help him sleep? Well, one thing I knew I couldn't do was take the "cry it out" approach, otherwise known as the Ferber method. Ever since I heard Dr. Ferber talking on the radio, saying that people have misinterpreted his approach, and that he doesn't always suggest letting a child cry for hours until they fall asleep, I've doubted his method. He also said he never came up with the term "Ferberize", and that people were promoting what they thought his ideas were, without having read his book. I've also read a number of other books that claim that letting a baby cry it out can actually be emotionally damaging to the baby, and teaches them to not trust their instincts, since their instinct to call out is never responded to. They also learn to not trust you. Whether it works or not, or whether it would scar my baby for life was beside the point; I simply was unable to listen to him cry for a long time, knowing that I could just go in and comfort him until he fell asleep.
At the other end of the spectrum, we had learned that lil'ReRe co-sleeping with us was not going to work out either. At the end of September, there were a few days that the air conditioning in our building was still on, even though the temperature had dropped, and it was simply too cold in our apartment for him to sleep by himself. It was very sweet to have him next to us, and waking up with him couldn't be beat. But he started waking up every hour to feed, and during the day, all of a sudden, he wouldn't sleep in his crib any more for his naps. We were both getting less sleep, especially on the nights my husband was on call, and his beeper was going off....
I re-read all the books we had, and talked to everyone I knew, and couldn't seem to find any new ideas that would work for us. So I went to the bookstore again, and found this book:
It seemed to be the sort of approach I was looking for, and it was recommended by Dr. Sears (his approach seems to work best for us). So what did the book suggest? I'm too tired to tell you, and lil'ReRe is asleep, so I'm going to bed, more tomorrow.....
Yesterday's Question of the Day (QofD) asked us to list 20 things we were grateful for. The first thing that came to mind was that I was grateful that my new haircut and styling products* keep my style through the night, and allow me to go 2, and even 3 days without washing it. This is huge for me right now, since I never have enough time to do the less urgent things in life (like my hair), but I've also become very tired of looking so shlepy when I go out. Then I thought that I should be less trite, and more earnest, about the things for which I am grateful. So I started making a list: my husband and son, my family, my friends. Brunch with friends, coffee with cream. But the more I thought about all the things I'm grateful for, the more emotional I became, since so many of them are things that I miss right now. I'm also missing a good night's sleep, which I haven't had in five months, and with lil'ReRe's cold, I haven't slept for more than 2 hours at a time for the last week, so controlling my emotions is about as easy as controlling tectonic shift. I became so melancholy, I erased the list and didn't post it. I went to bed, hoping for at least some respite from the sleep deprivation.
It didn't happen. The poor little guy still woke every 2 hours, either coughing or having a hard time breathing because of his congestion. I had a doctor's appointment this morning, so my husband stayed home with the little guy. The only clean pants I had were my maternity jeans. I would have been grateful if these no longer fit, but they do, so I wore them. While trying to get something quick to eat, I dropped the juice, which spilled all over me and the kitchen. I left, biting my lip and hoping I could make it to the doctor's office without falling apart. Unfortunately for the well-meaning cab driver, this didn't happen either.
But my hair looked fabulous.
Later on, I had an appointment with a dietitician. I've been worried that, since I can't have dairy, I haven't been taking in all the nutrients I need to breastfeed my little guy as well as I could. It seemed like for every question she asked me, like could I get more fresh veggies, or more exercise, or more regular meals, I answered that I was too exhausted, to busy doing other things, too brain dead, to take better care of myself. She paused for a second, and said she had something that might be able to help.
She gave me her babysitter's phone number.
It's now time to go to bed again, and I'm a little more hopeful about tomorrow. Lil'ReRe has slept for 3 hours now. My brother is coming by, and will take care of him while I try to get some sleep. And if I get a call back from the babysitter, I may just have something else to be grateful for. For now, I still think I'm pretty lucky. I've got a beautiful son, and really great hair.
* I had my hair cut by Joseph at Civello, the one in Rosedale. He recommended Aveda Pure Abundance Shampoo and Conditioner, and Sap Moss Hair Spray. It may be pricy, but if I use it every three days, it lasts three times as long.
After reading my post yesterday, my friends Terah and Jason decided I needed an intervention. They drove into town from Waterloo, and called me from my foyer so that I couldn't escape or go shopping. They cornered me in my livingroom, one of them sitting on either side of me, and informed me that they had come to conduct an intervention. They felt that, without direct action, I would never allow someone to babysit my son while I enjoyed some time on my own. In order to stay on task, and to not let me distract them or change the subject, they had written down what they wanted to tell me:
1. I had to come to Waterloo. I would be transported by their fuel-efficient limo service (i.e. Echo).
2. Terah could help me pack right away. They had sufficient baby clothes to provide lil'ReRe with an exploration in dress-up.
3. I would be provided with a cruelty-free vegan diet from a local Buddhist place so I wouldn't have to worry about my dairy restrictions or cooking. We may also partake in cheese-less homemade pizza.
4. I would be provided with a room with a bed, a crib and change table, and books. I could sleep whenever I wanted, and get up whenever I wanted.
5. I would, however, be required to go to a day spa.
6. Jason would babysit. He dislikes both Dubya and Dr. Ferber. In their home, babies are fed when they are hungry, go to sleep when they are tired, and get to sleep with their parents if they want to.
Under these conditions, I would finally have to let go and relax, rest, and do something nice for myself.
Now, Terah and Jason didn't force me into their car and make me leave right away. Instead, we went for Vietnamese. But they did get me to commit to coming sometime soon. I'll talk to lil'ReRe and see when his calendar is clear.
