Sleep Part 1

Having a blog for us is two-fold. It allows us to keep our friends and family updated with happenings in our lives, but it also gives us an avenue to document things for ourselves. I’ve tried to journal and failed at it miserably. I have a box of 20 or so journals, each with about ten pages of writing. I like to write, but typing the words is just easier for me than writing them out. And, if you know us well, you know that we tend to do our research about just about everything. So, for us, our blog is a scrapbook and reference guide all in one!

Since Analiese was born, I feel like we’ve been doing constant research on sleep. Sleep is important for babies. One of the most common questions new parents get is “how is he/she sleeping?” I think sleep is the most talked about topic among moms of babies…especially new mamas. As a first time mom, I had no idea how important is was to know when your baby needed sleep and how to help them do just that. (There is a window of when they “sleep like a baby”, but it doesn’t last long!)

Of course, like anything, there are different schools of thought on how to let your baby sleep. Some choose to follow the baby’s lead and let them sleep, eat and be awake whenever they want to. Others teach their babies how to follow a routine. Knowing our own personalities, we chose the latter method. I don’t claim to be an expert on this subject at all. We read lots of books and tried a few different techniques and eventually found what worked best for us and Analiese. She’s such a great sleeper now and we are well rested, too.

For some of you, this is going to be incredibly boring and my feelings will not be hurt if you just move along to the next post in your Google Reader. For others – perhaps some soon-to-be new mamas out there – I hope this helps. I remember discussing the topic with everyone I could think of the first few weeks we were trying to figure this sleep thing out.

So, without further ado…

Week 1-3: Let Analiese (A) sleep whenever and wherever she wanted. Ross was home the first week, we had meals in the freezer and others being brought to us from friends at church, and friends and family were staying with us to help out once Ross returned to work. We were a little tired from the typical sporadic sleeping, but we had help and I had been told that you really just have to let a newborn do her thing for a few weeks. Plus, it was really sweet to have a newborn fall asleep on us. We didn’t mind at all.

Week 4-5: Must. have. a. schedule. For me, it was just too stressful to plan doctor’s appointments and anything else without knowing if the time was going to be when A would be awake, asleep, hungry, fussy, etc. As much as I wanted to wear A around the house in my Moby Wrap all day long, I really wanted to develop a routine with her and teach her to sleep in her crib. We sought advice from family and friends and began to read a few sleep related books: The Baby Whisperer and it’s counterpart, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Baby and The Happiest Baby on the Block (dvd).  The Baby Whisperer provided a sample 3-hour EASY (E – eat, A – activity, S – sleep, Y – you) routine for 4-week olds, so I decided to start there. The book also provided a “Four S” ritual to promote sleep at nap time:

• Set the stage: We made the room as dark as possible and turned white noise on. (We downloaded a white noise cd from iTunes and played it on repeat.)
• Swaddle: We use the miracle blanket. During the colder months, we’d wrap a receiving blanket around the miracle blanket as well. Snug as a bug in a rug.
• Sit: BW suggests sitting in a chair and holding the swaddled baby upright over your shoulder. A did not like this and it was not a consistent way of calming her.
• Shh-pat: This was the BW method of teaching the baby to self-soothe. Although she responded to the shh-ing, turning her on her side to pat her back was tiring and frustrating for us since it didn’t seem to work very well for A.

Amazingly enough, even though A’s naps weren’t great at this point, the 3-hour routine immediately got her to understand the difference between daytime and nighttime sleep. She’s been sleeping through the night ever since. Sleeping through the night at this point meant falling asleep after her 7 p.m. feed, getting a “dream feed” at 10 p.m. (this consists of Ross picking A up out of her crib while she’s asleep and giving her a bottle of expressed milk) and awake sometime between 6 and 7 a.m. with a night feeding anytime between 2 and 4 a.m.. Sometimes there was a second night waking, but not often.

Week 6: Watched Happiest Baby on the Block dvd and decided to try some of Dr. Harvey Karps soothing methods in lieu of the BW’s sitting and shh-pat. Dr. Karp uses “5 S’s” to calm a baby and prepare it for sleep:

• Swaddling: See above. Continued to swaddle A in the Miracle Blanket and receiving blanket, if needed.
• Side/stomach positioning in the parents’ arms: For me, the most comfortable way to do this was to hold her in an outward breastfeeding hold/football hold. It proved to be a position that A liked and would usually calm to a sleep. The challenge at this point was to get her from your arms facing one direction into her crib in another direction without waking her up. Not easy.
• Swinging: This could be done in an actual swing. However, we don’t have one of those so we used his “shaking” method where the babies head gently jiggles while being supported in your hand. It took some practice to do it comfortably with a squirming baby in your arms, but it seemed to work for a few days. Eventually, though, it just stopped working.
• Shh-ing: The shh-ing while “shaking” did calm her to a sleep, but again, the transition to her crib was never an easy task.
• Sucking: For us, this meant letting her suck on our pinky finger until she fell asleep once she was in her crib. The side/stomach, shaking and shhing calmed her enough that if her eyes popped open once we put her down, the sucking finished the job. The trick here was removing the pinky once she was asleep without waking her up.

Even though A’s naps were far from perfect, she was still sleeping great at night with only one night waking. It started to get later and later, so I knew we were moving in a good direction and would soon not have any night wakings. She always fell asleep while I fed her at 7 p.m. and then Ross and I had a few hours to ourselves. Until one night, she woke up and started crying as I was heading upstairs for the night. I freaked out. I knew that our efforts to help her soothe herself to sleep would fail and I didn’t know what to do.

While I was all wrapped up in routines and soothing methods, Ross had been reading Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Baby. A colleague of his had given us the book after having success with it himself. One of the methods is called “extinction” which could be interpreted as “crying it out”. I wasn’t a fan of the idea, but it had been an exhausting day and I was desperate. So, we let her cry. It was awful. But, she tuckered herself out and fell asleep on her own and we all had a good night’s sleep.

Week 7: We took one day at a time and assessed each nap differently. We weren’t really sold on anything. I questioned our approach daily especially if she woke up early from a nap. We just wanted A to sleep well because we knew she’d be a happy baby if she was a well-rested baby. We continued to make the room as dark as we could, play white noise, swaddle her, holding her on her side/stomach with soft singing and then shh-ing and then let her suck our finger until she dozed off. If she just wouldn’t fall asleep, we left and let her cry until she put herself to sleep. Quickly, the length of crying decreased from 30 to 20 to 10 minutes. Most of her naps during the day went pretty well with little or no crying. Her very last nap of the day (a shorter “cat nap” so that she was rested for her bath) never seemed to work no matter what method we used, though.

Week 8: The consistency of naps started to improve. I decided to drop the side/stomach and shaking and hold her cradled in my arms instead. Swaying back and forth while softly singing to her and then shh-ing worked nicely. It was a lot easier to transition her to her crib, too.

Week 11: Naps started to be really short (30-45 minutes). I also noticed that A wasn’t really too interested in our pinky as much as she had been. On a whim, I decided to not offer her my pinky when I put her down. I swayed with her until her eyes got heavy and she yawned once or twice. Then, I laid her down, awake, and left. She cried for five minutes and was asleep. From that point on, her naps got longer because she had learned to soothe herself to sleep. Sometimes she’d cry and other times she’d quietly fall asleep on her own. The crying was part of her self-soothing. No more night wakings! Life is good.

Week 12: Had night wakings two nights in a row, most likely due to a growth spurt that usually happens around three months. I fed her when she woke and she went right back to sleep.

Week 14: By four months, babies should be able to go 4 hours in between feedings. So, I decided to begin transitioning her from a 3-hour EASY to a 4-hour EASY. I visited the Baby Whisperer message boards to find a recommendation for how to do this. I liked this one that does the transition in five minute increments. It’s a slow transition to make it fair to baby and not make her overtired in the process. The first day of each transition is always a little off because she’s getting used to being up for 5 more minutes than usual. It doesn’t sound like much, but five minutes is a long time when you’re used to being up only an hour and half at a time. The end result will be a routine that consists of two hours of awake time and two 2-hour naps.

Week 15: The transition is going pretty well. A has been waking up a little earlier in the mornings and doesn’t always sleep as long as her nap should be, but that’s expected since we’re changing the routine every three days. I’m tempted to only stick with each routine for the three day minimum, but I know the overall transition will be smoother and more consistent if I read her signs and only move to the next transition when she’s ready for it. We’re now on transition 3 of 12.

So that’s where we are right now. She’s still being swaddled, but is showing signs that she’s ready to be weaned from it (i.e. rolling from her back to her stomach – we’re now using a sleep positioner). I’m hesitant to start the weaning process until we’re done with the 3-4 hour EASY transition, though. Thankfully, she’s still soothing herself to sleep for all naps. Some of the routines have a cat nap in the evening…for some reason, this nap rarely happens.

Looking back, once we decided to do sleep training with A, I felt like we were in a rush to figure out exactly what would be best for her. If I had known what a challenge it was going to be, I would have read some of the books and talked to others about it while I was pregnant so that we were more prepared and had an idea about what approach we wanted to take. Then again, every baby is different. We had to adapt our approach based on A’s responses.

Some may think our approach to sleep training is a little overboard. However, since I was not able to discern her cries very well, having a routine of some sort helped me to know what she needed based on where we were in the routine. She hardly cries at all now. I know that’s due in part to who she is, but I also know that we’re meeting her needs whether it be hunger or reset without overfeeding her or forcing her to sleep when she isn’t tired or play when she is.