Updates from the department of SLEEP
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.
Leave a Reply