Parent Extremis

It was a hard day, Noah was difficult. Cranky? Drooly? Teething? Constipation? Crawling difficulties? Sleep Regressions? The Wonder Weeks?

Cabernet Savignon is the answer whatever you think the question may be!

Alas, Noah has a rough day and I can’t attribute it to any one factor. But other than today I am finding seven months to be a cheerful and enjoyable age. For the most part Noah sleeps well and eats well and plays well. We have garnered ourselves a decent routine that seems to be more challenging for me than for him.

I do know a few other parents who are still having a lot of trouble getting their six and seven month olds to sleep well. Here are some recommendations originally published on Parents.com.

1. Give your child a quiet and calm period before bedtime. Figure out which activities are effective in calming your child. For many, it’s reading, singing, or a warm bath. Sticking to a regular routine will help your child understand that it will soon be time to go to sleep. Limit television viewing, video games, and active play shortly before bed.

2. Set a consistent schedule. Decide on a time for your child to go to sleep and make bedtime the same every night. His sleep patterns will adjust accordingly.

3. Encourage your child to take a favorite teddy bear or special blanket to bed. These comforting items often help children fall asleep — especially if they wake up in the middle of the night.

4. Make sure your child is comfortable. Make sure that she is comfortable with the temperature in her room and that she’s wearing pajamas that fit well. She may also feel more at ease with a drink of water, a night-light, or the door left slightly open.

5. Avoid returning to your child’s room every time he calls out. A child will quickly learn if you always give in to his requests at bedtime. However, it’s important to reassure your child that you are there if he needs you. Try waiting several seconds before responding and taking longer each time he calls out. (A few minutes of crying is okay, but listen to your baby and if he seems to be in distress go to him.)

Source: American Academy of Pediatrics

In one of the many, many, many baby sleep books I read that left me doubting** not only myself but also the reliability and validity of the many baby-sleep theories out there I recall a passage saying that a baby will naturally regulate their daytime sleep pattern around the age of five months. And dammit, I think that was right.

Just last week, at the age of five and a half months I finally put Noah down for day-time naps that seemed to last a long time and occur at the same time each day. And he only cried for a few minutes and seemed grateful for the sleep.

In his early weeks I let him nurse and nap in my arms while I caught up on some very important Tivo’d television. But, as he got older and I needed to get some things done I needed him to nap in some sort of baby-holding-device other than myself.

It was only about a month ago that Noah’s wake-up time in the morning seemed to be consistent from day to day. So after waking up and nursing and hanging out in bed while I prayed for a brief nap from him, we get up and come downstairs and he plays while I eat breakfast. By the time I have eaten and cleaned up and checked some email and let the dog out he is cranky and whining for me. Add in a fast calming nursed-feeding and he’s back to sleep. Where he used to sleep on me, I now put him upstairs in his crib and he has slept for anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours.

I’m hoping our consistency develops into the two-hour nap days.

** I still think that many of the baby books out there today are theories based in scare tactics: DO THIS or else you are setting your child up for a lifetime of insomia. Please. Parents are just trying to survive, do we really need to add to our plethora of worries?

Noah is taking a nap right now and I just ate lunch and am now sitting at the kitchen counter in utter and total silence watching him on the video monitor.

After feeding him downstairs in front of the television with the dog running around yapping I noticed that he looked tired so I just carried him upstairs and put him in his crib. I turned to close the curtains fully expecting him to wake up and scream about the whole putting-the-baby-down thing and demand a new diaper, another feeding, twenty-bucks for the night, ma! But he didn’t. He opened his eyes just long enough to establish where he was and then he closed them and went back to sleep and that was a whole thirty minutes ago. If past performance is an indicator of future behavior he will be waking up with a scream in about eleven minutes.

But for now, SUCCESS!

Noah’s upset sleep patterns a few weeks ago were due to a period of extreme growth and neurological development. I believe this and I read it in a book too. Since that period of awfulness he has returned to sleeping through the night and he has also mastered, MASTERED I tell ya’ the art of rolling over back-to-front and front-to-back. He’s a little genius!

The book, The Wonder Weeks describes major developmental milestones in a baby’s life and when they occur, approximately. This book doesn’t tell you what to do about them, which is cool because we all know I don’t like being told how to parent. But, by knowing when some major developments are going to occur it prepares you steel yourself for those tough weeks when your baby doesn’t sleep so well or needs more feeding or is just overall clingy and fussy.

EDITED TO ADD: It was more like seven minutes. URGH.

Okay, so as a parent there are these moments when you wonder what the hell has just happened to your sleep, routine, life, whatever … because something that you have come to depend on as routine and expected suddenly changes with no warning whatsoever. Frequently you read about this stuff before you have the baby but when it actually happens your brain seems to have spilled the information out into the dirty diaper pail during one of the five hundred middle-of-the-night diaper changes.

Noah’s sleep was shot all to bloody hell about a week ago and it left me frantically fumbling around like a sixteen year old in the dark after getting caught making out with a boy.

So I did what I do when things happen to me: I blogged about it.

And my fabulous readers who I love more than blogging itself left me a comment and told me to go read some stuff that Moxie wrote awhile back about babies and … (DUH DUH DUUUUHHHHHHHH) why their sleep gets all fucked up at certain times of their lives.

The concept is called sleep regression and it is detailed in a book called The Wonder Weeks where it goes into detail rather extensively but the short of it is that there are several periods of time during which neurological growth is so intense that baby’s sleep is interrupted, often intensely so. Those periods of growth include weeks 5, 8, 12, 19, 26, 37, 46, and 55 (that’s as far as they studied), according to the authors, Hetty Vanderijt and Frans Plooij.

KEY: MORE DRAMATIC MUZAK BECAUSE NOAH IS 19 WEEKS OLD RIGHT NOW.

So I assume this will fade, in time, and if not, and he never sleeps through the night again, I am taking a definite peace that in 18 years it won’t be my problem anymore.

So you know … at some point, it’ll get better.

I also totally attribute my lackadaisical bordering on psychotic calmness to the sleep deprivation that I am experiencing due to this little sleep regression thingy.

Noah has been sleeping through the night - like 7:30pm-to-6:30am for about a month now.

It began when he was about 12 weeks old. And it was like heaven schmeared with chocolate cream and drizzled with whipped cream and cherries.

It stopped at 17 weeks.

And that was last week.

I don’t know to what I should attribute this hellacious and unfortunate turn of events. Because I am a woman and therefore prone to the unstoppable need to blame and find fault with everything that goes a little bit awry. I blame the fact that we kept Noah out too long on the first night of Passover. Is it possible that keeping him awake too long, letting him fall asleep in the car then waking him up to get him dressed in pajamas and putting him back to bed caused a massive tidal wave of problems falling asleep and problems staying asleep for like, another week and a half? We had a few different visitors that week too and things were busy. Was that it? Is he teething? Is he going through a major growth spurt? On the cusp of a major developmental milestone?

WHAT IS KEEPING MY BABY FROM SLEEPING LIKE HE USED TO???

It is just not fair, NOT FAIR at all to a new mother when after three months of NOT sleeping at all she gets to sleep, finally - and for seven hours at a time - and she then gets tossed back into the throws of waking up at 2 o’clock in the damn morning to feed and comfort the baby.

Ideas? I know he’ll sleep one day, but dear god, please let that be tonight.

Today was the first really hot day of this year. Not like scorching Phoenix in July hot, but it was in the seventies. I wore shorts and was sweating while I carried Noah in the Baby Bjorn as we walked around. The house is hot — I have all the windows open and the fans on. So, it’s warm … and if you aren’t sitting still, it’s uncomfortably warm.

Noah’s bedroom get all day sun and his room faces the sidewalk so I am loathe to open his window, lest those pesky fucking barking dog (Ahem! even my own pesky fucking barking dog) wake him from his delicate slumber. I couldn’t decide what he should wear to sleep in.

Naked with just a diaper? We aren’t that desperate yet.
A short sleeve bodysuit? His legs will get cold.
A long sleeve bodysuit? His legs will get cold. Still. Don’t you have any real ideas?
Pajamas with feet and long arms? Won’t he get hot????!!!

I have spent many years often agonizing over what to wear to a certain occasion or event. I take careful notes on the weather forecast, the nature of the event, the fabric content of the clothing choices, and then I debate some more and most often choose what makes my ass look largest. I’m not the best at fashion. I dress for comfort. So what to put Noah in tonight so he’ll be warm and comfortable but not too warm that he can’t sleep?

It’s been a long week. Marc was out of town so I did the single parent thing. I’m a teeny bit worn down … forgive my over-thinking.

My solution was to take his most tight fitting pair of footed cotton Gerber (From Target) pajamas and cut the feet off. This way he is covered but not too covered. Enough skin exposure for comfort in a house thats about seventy five degrees.

I am sure you have all been on the edge of your seat waiting to find out if my little Noah has slept at all, anywhere, since I last posted about co-sleeping and newborn sleep. Mainly, how they don’t. At least not where and when you would like them to.

I read a bunch of sleep books, the last one being The No-Cry Sleep Solution and it totally spoke to me, I’m telling ya! Actually, there were a few main points that worked really well for us. Essentially, make a damn bedtime routine. It wasn’t occuring to me that a baby, a three-month old needed a routine with books and special parent time, but, durr! why not?

So for the record, I wasn’t a fan of the cry-it-out method, but it’s normal for a baby to cry for like, five minutes or so when you first put them down. How long the baby is allowed to cry is something that each parent must decide for themselves. It is not easy for a new mom to listen to her baby cry. Her boobs leak, her heart aches, her head pounds and she stands around the corner wonder how long she should let this continue. I am okay letting Noah cry, for a few minutes, if and only if it leads to sleep, and lots of it.

What is working the best for us is that I created a bedtime routine and I stick with it every day. Of course the time varies by about thirty minutes to an hour. I let him get sleepy, give him a bath, nurse and if he needs more time, we read books. Going forward, I’d like to actually have more reading time, and I suppose I’ll add that in as he gets older and can actually listen to the story rather than grab my boob the minute I start in with “In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon…”

Okay, so to wrap up this horribly un-flowing and runon entry I will say that I had read books about crying it out and books about how babies need to sleep with their parents and I wasn’t sure where I fell on the spectrum. I found that creating a routine and listening to your baby’s cues worked really well for me.

Sleeping with your baby is beautiful and natural, sadly, it isn’t the safest place for the baby. A baby is safest in a crib with a tight fitted sheet and no toys or blankets or bumpers. However, somewhere between these juxtaposing notions is the reality of having a newborn. I have recently admitted to co-sleeping with my two month old, I swear to you, I do it with one eye open. Explains my exhaustion a bit, no?

Jackie, of Nursing Your Kids, recently wrote a very thorough entry about the dangers of sleeping with your babies and young children. She also notes that if you are set on sleeping with your children, there are ways to do it safely. Keep pillows and loose bedding away from the baby. Keep the baby on his back. You can also use a co-sleeper or a snuggle nest.

If you cornered a group of new mothers and asked them (in secret of course) if they slept with their baby, a good amount of them would confess. The practicalities are endless, really. Nursing is much easier and you both get more sleep. That isn’t to say that safety should be tossed to the curb, but when you are facing your second and third MONTH of 4-hours-of-sleep-a-night you get a little desperate.

I think it is hard for any new first-time mother to know for sure what her baby’s sleeping habits will be and where the baby will sleep. I do recommend knowing the ways to co-sleep safely and also having a safe crib nearby in case co-sleeping isn’t for you, or if you are lucky enough to have a baby who sleeps alone for extended periods of time, you know, like, more than fifteen minutes.

Supposedly, underground co-sleeping is so wide-spread that Babytalk magazine is running a survey about sleep habits. Click here to participate.

When I was pregnant I read books about pregnancy and giving birth. I didn’t read any baby books. Actually, I didn’t think I needed it. After all, I have practiced taking care of babies and children since I was ten years old. I figured I would love my baby, feed him and clean him, teach him good values and all and mostly … follow my intuition.

Awhile back I wrote about Noah not sleeping in a crib and how he slept with me on me. And I soon ate my words because he did a little sleeping in the co-sleeper for about two nights. My doctor reassured me and said that the first month is totally fair game and just to sleep wherever and however you can. So we did. And the next day I bought every baby-sleep book I could find in hopes of figuring out a plan of action for getting little Noah to sleep by himself, anywhere but on top of me.

I read this book and then I read this book and then I threw them both across the room and cried for awhile because, dude! they contradict each other, badly. And I think both books told me I was a very bad mother for not doing something sooner.

See, this is exactly why I didn’t read baby books. They are all a bunch of “theories” and “methods” and some of them work for some people, but they can also make you feel like a real bork of a parent. I kept looking through books and they all seem to be based on some sort of scare tactic, you know, if you don’t do this method you child will grow up to be a hopeless insomnia who might go all Menendez on you one day. Um, no thank you.

I am now back to my original plan, do what feels right. It won’t be a tragedy if Noah doesn’t sleep in his own room through the night for a few more months. I do believe that some babies need more close contact and some babies do sleep better than other.

For now, I’m trying to put Noah in his crib in the evening, when he is tired. I let him cry for a few minutes but not for hours. Not even close. It just doesn’t feel right to me.

If I had absolute 100% confidence in the cry-it-out method, I’d do it. But I am not willing to go through that trauma (me) and racket (Noah) if there is even a remote chance it won’t work.

And all those self-soothing ideas? Yeah, they don’t work for us.

If you had a baby who was a bad sleeper I would love to hear what worked for you and what didn’t.

Does your kid use a pacifier? If so, when did you first give it to him?

Pacifiers do serve and actual purpose. We have all seen the over-stressed and perhaps ill-equipped mother shove a pacifier in the mouth of her seven year old in the middle of Target, but it is not a silencing device really. Infants have a need to suckle. It calms them. They are able to breastfeed with different amounts of sucking depending on their level of hunger. As long as all of their other needs are met, I see nothing wrong with the modern day pacifier to help stretch out a nap-time or make a car ride more pleasant. Pacifiers nowadays are made much better than several decades ago and do not, contrary to what you may hear, cause any orthodontic or speech problems.

Personally, I was a thumb-sucking kid. I started as a newborn and stopped, for good, sometime in my I-am-not-kidding teen years. It was clearly a self-soothing thing and if I hadn’t screwed up my teeth to all hell, I’d still do it today. My mother was vehemently against pacifiers. Go ahead … psycho-analyze the shit out that one.

When I was pregnant and preparing for Noah to be born I was very certain that I wanted him to have a self-soothing method, whatever it may be. So far, his only soothing tool is my boob, much to the chagrin of my nipples and my ability to get much sleep. Alas, he is young, seven weeks, he has no coordination and couldn’t suck his own thumb if he tried. I digress …

I am all in favor of the pacifier. For one thing, you can take it away. You cannot take a thumb away. Know what I’m sayin? So I bought pacifiers. I bought several different kinds, just in case one was shaped better than another kind. I boiled them and was all ready to hand him a pacifier the moment he got a little fussy. Ha! Haa! Hahahahah!!! The parenting gods laugh in my face.

Noah will not, under any circumstances, take a pacifier, of any brand or sort or color or shape.

Another mother told me she gave her son a pacifier in the hospital and he uses it for sleeping only now nine months later. I chose to wait until he was securely breastfeeding to avoid the dreaded and often hotly debated issue of nipple confusion. For now, we are not a pacifier family. Perhaps when he gets older he will take one, but for now I suppose I should count my blessings and not worry about saving for braces.

To read about other nap-time issues, click here.

Greetings!

I’m the new writer for Parent Extremis. I’m no more qualified to write for this site than I am to care for my own seven week old baby. So it should be a fun ride! No, really, I plan to use this site to evaluate and discuss a variety of parenting issues. I hope you will stay tuned for some potentially riveting, or at least mildly interesting discussions of all the issues I can dream up including breast versus bottle feeding, sleep issues (co-sleeping vs. crying it out), the effect of pregnancy on the family, dealing with pediatrician visits and vaccination controversy, dealing with toddlers, heading back to work, discipline methods and much more.

I recently became a stay at home mom, or a work at home mom who does some freelance writing, to Noah, born December 21, 2007. He is almost eight weeks old and I love him more than life itself. We live with my hardworking and devoted husband, Marc, four cats and a yappy little dog.