Newborn sleep 2.0

I will admit: we are a sleep-obsessed family. Take the old adage, "If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy," change it to, "If baby ain't sleeping, ain't nobody happy," and you get an insight into our little world.

The past 10 weeks have been a roller coaster of emotions and expectations, nearly all of which boil down to concerns over sleep -- not getting enough, when will our lives return to normal....ohmygoddidwemakeahorriblemistake. The conclusion is that no, in fact, we did not make a mistake; we have another wonderful sleeper on our hands, but it just took us some time to adjust. In many ways learning to be patient with newborn sleep was a lot harder for Matt and me this second time around because Natalie set the bar so high with her excellent sleep habits from early on, and we were unrealistically eager to get that show on the road with Adam.

We had forgotten some things along the way and we tried some new tricks this time, too. Ultimately, we had a really successful time with Adam's newborn sleep stage even though in the thick of it all we wouldn't have admitted so easily that things weren't that bad.

Here's what we forgot:
Newborns can typically only stay awake for 1-2 hour stretches for the first few months
Adam would cry, and we'd think, "Well, you have a clean diaper and a full stomach, but maybe you still need to keep eating?" Wrong. He really needed to sleep. Rereading my favorite baby sleep book, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child corrected that mistake fast and we started putting Adam down for naps and bedtime much more quickly. We discovered that Adam has a 1 hour, 15 minute awake cycle. By about 1 hour of being awake he needs to start his soothing to sleep routine.

Try to put babies down drowsy but awake
In those earliest weeks it really doesn't matter what you do; a baby will sleep whenever and however it feels like sleeping. But, out of parenting necessity, we wanted to get Adam aboard the Better Sleep Habits Train as early as possible, so we started trying to put him down drowsy but awake starting when he was about 5 weeks old. This meant that, though he would often fall asleep while nursing or even having a bottle, we'd wait until the feeding was over to swaddle him so that he'd be awake but ready to fall asleep by the time he got into his crib.

Here's what we did differently this time:
Adam slept in his own room when he was less than 2 weeks old
I already mentioned this, but this point bears repeating. If I was doing it all over again, I would have insisted on Natalie sleeping in her own room much earlier. Even though she was in the nursery for bedtime by the time she was 6 weeks old, I think we all could have been a lot happier if we'd ripped the Band-Aid off sooner. This time around we did, and we were much happier.

Adam got an early bedtime at 6 weeks
Natalie didn't earn an early bedtime until she was 3 months old. This time around, we knew we wanted to do that differently. I already also mentioned, though, how in our haste we tried to force an early bedtime on Adam when he was only a few weeks old. That was a major failure. We tried again, though, when Adam turned 6 weeks old, and despite a few rough nights at the beginning of that effort, Adam has maintained a bedtime that falls between 6:30 and 7 p.m. and it has led to some seriously good sleep habits (sleep begets sleep!). We must start his bedtime routine early to account for the possibility that it could take him some time to wind down, but by his second week of an early bedtime he stopped waking up before midnight. This meant he was consistently getting at least a 5-hour stretch of sleep every night beginning at 7 weeks old. His first incredibly long stretch of sleep (longer than 6 hours) came when he was 8 weeks old and slept for 9.5 hours straight. Now that Adam's 10 weeks old he seems to be in a holding pattern of waking up around 3 a.m. (meaning he's asleep for 8-8.5 hours) feeding for about 15 minutes, and then waking up "for the day" from anywhere between 6:30 and 7:30 a.m. One blessed night a few days ago the child actually slept from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. The skies parted and the angels sang.

Adam takes most of his naps in his crib
This is another point I mentioned that once again bears repeating. We treated newborn Natalie as our portable little baby, not really concerned with whether or not she napped in her crib. Because Natalie has her own nap schedule though (typically between 1 and 3:30 each day) we are more homebound and therefore have gotten Adam to take nearly all his naps while at home in his crib. He's a champion at sleeping in the Ergo carrier, which is great because Natalie still has activities and trips that get in the way of him always sleeping at home when he needs to, but I'm glad that he has some solid napping experience in his crib already.

The pause
We sort of did "the pause" with Natalie, but we are really following this technique with Adam, partly out of necessity and partly because we now know better. Basically, as the book Bringing Up Bebe reveals, European parents are more likely to use this technique of waiting approximately 5 minutes after a baby makes his initial sound before entering the baby's room. We do this with Adam, both at naptime and at night, and on many occasions have discovered that he puts himself back to sleep in that 5-minute window. It may be challenging to hear a baby cry and not respond, but we have to remember that our baby is better for learning how to put himself back to sleep and not having his sleep interrupted before he's really ready to wake up.

Adam sometimes cries a little to put himself to sleep
I think when I only had Natalie, I believed that if a baby cried some while going to sleep, that was "crying it out." No, "crying it out" is truly when parents just leave their babies in their rooms to let them cry for as long as it takes to fall asleep. As Dr. Weissbluth points out in his book, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Baby, "extinction" or "gradual extinction" are two methods most parents actually use that people often confuse with "crying it out." In both these methods, babies are only allowed to cry after all their needs have been met, and these are techniques that Dr. Weissbluth recommends only using once a baby has reached 4 months old. In true "crying it out" there's no real regard for whether or not a baby's needs have been satisfied. With Natalie I really thought I couldn't let her cry while falling asleep before turning 4 months old. But upon rereading Healthy Sleep Habits, I was reminded that it's quite normal for tiny babies to still need to cry (fuss) a little before going to sleep. So, we've discovered that sometimes Adam needs up to 5 minutes of crying to get to sleep. Once he hits that 5-minute mark, though, we know he's reached the point where he won't fall asleep without our help. Often he only needs something as simple as one of us holding him for a couple minutes, and then he's truly out.

But we have been impatient
Considering how great Adam is today in terms of sleep, you'd think our lives have been perfect of the past 10 weeks. As I said earlier, though, we were sort of brats about his sleep habits before they really turned the corner around the 7-week mark. I definitely crashed at week 5. I felt like I had 5 weeks' worth of adrenaline, and then I hit a wall at week 5 and felt like I couldn't function. I definitely cried a number of times, once several times in one day, and I even went so far as to tell Matt when he got home from work one day, "If you were wondering what's the number of children a couple should have, the correct answer is no more than one." I was sleep deprived, I wasn't being nice, and I wasn't thinking straight. A set of ladies and their toddlers bounded up to me at the mall during this sleep-deprived period when I was able to run a few errands with only Adam in tow. The ladies, assuming I was a first-time mother, looked at me wistfully and said, "Once you get over that 6-week hump, the hardest time is over." I knew this was true, too, but I could not imagine a life in which I would ever sleep again. It's so easy to take whatever you're experiencing that week with a newborn and think this will be the rest of your life, but it's so important to remember how quickly babies change.

Now I just hope the changes we have ahead of us are for the better, not for the worse.

Two kids, one adult

For the past four weeks, when friends and family would ask how we were doing adjusting to life with two kids, Matt and I would respond that things were going shockingly well. Nothing has changed in that regard, except to say that life got a lot more real yesterday when Matt returned to work full time. Adam's first four weeks of life will forever be referred to as our "honeymoon" period because it really was quite easy having two adults at home managing two kids. Now that Matt's back at work and my work is picking up again, I can't say we're going to have the same easy experience.

So, I am trying to adjust to the new normal. With Natalie, the new normal came at times as a bit of a shock. I had to feed her just the same amount any newborn needs to be fed, but as a first-time mom it felt like I was just always feeding my child. Now I see breastfeeding Adam as a quiet break from the sometimes-chaos of the day. But with two kids the constant question in my mind is, "What do I do when they're both freaking out at the same time?" To this, I have no good answer, other than to say that kids are just going to cry at times, and they'll have to be patient (I know, not really something either of them understands) because one adult cannot handle two kids' every needs at every single minute of the day. I just try not to cry with them.

A particularly good moment

Of course, as I said at the beginning, the transition to two adults and two kids and now one adult and two kids has been majorly easier than I thought it would be. Here are some key points from our new life thus far:

The morning shower necessity
Somewhere between 7:30 and 8:45 a.m. Adam and I are "up for the day." The point is, newborns don't have schedules, right? And newborns sleep the majority of the day anyway, so to say that Adam will or won't be awake at any given time is a crap shoot because he's only awake for about two hours at a time max.

Although I feel about 95 percent recovered from my c-section, I am still experiencing the notorious postpartum night sweats and they absolutely suck. I am so tired of waking up (or really, being woken up) in the middle of the night in a pool of my own sweat. Add to this the fact that it's the dead of winter, so the sweats make me super cold, and I'm just unhappy in bed. The point of this is that for me right now skipping a morning shower is just not an option. As tempting as it is to get in 10 more minutes of sleep, I've been trying to orchestrate a shower for myself every morning so I can not feel disgusting.

There are mornings like yesterday when Adam wakes up at 8:25 am., does a quick feeding, and then sleeps in his crib for another hour, giving me a perfect window for taking a shower before tending to Natalie.

Then there are mornings like today when Adam wakes up at 8 a.m. just as I have started running the shower water and I have to quickly throw on a robe, change him, feed him, soothe him, and manage to get him to sit in his bouncer seat in our bathroom for 10 minutes while I get myself together.

Either way, it's not bad, and I'm not complaining. There's just no sure-fire way for me to get in a shower unless I'm ready at a second's notice when there's a moment of peace.

The obliging toddler
Of all the things in my current bag of tricks, here's the best one: my two-year old happily hangs out in her crib until 9 a.m. I know. This is insane and absolutely not normal, but I am hoping to ride this wave as long as possible. Because Natalie is so obliging, on mornings like this one I was able to feed Adam a second time while Natalie played with her (now eight) stuffed animals who have taken up residence in her crib in her new room. I handed her five books from her bookcase, and while I was in the nursery adjacent to her room I enjoyed eavesdropping on her reading Peter Rabbit and Llama Llama to herself. There's something about hearing her say "Floppsy, Mopsy and Cottontail" that makes me smile.

After Natalie's officially done with her books in her crib for the morning, I get her dressed and then bring her downstairs for a morning bottle (yes, she is still drinking milk three times a day out of a bottle -- it continues to be her final vestige of babyhood). We sit and watch a few videos from her YouTube channel while I put her hair in ponytails (still haven't gotten her a first haircut...probably should). Adam may or may not be with us during this time.

She is still a horribly picky eater, so breakfast may or may not happen, with cereal or berries or a bagel. If I suggest cream cheese on her bagel, she says "no cream cheese." If I assume that she does not want cream cheese on her bagel, based on her track record for the past two weeks, she'll of course insist that I get out that cream cheese and slather it all over her bagel. Such is life with a toddler.

Natalie oversees Baby Adam's activity gym time

In addition to showing a positive interest in what Adam's doing for at least a portion of each day, Natalie has been totally into using her art supplies, which is amazing. I just strap that child into her amazing high chair and let her go to town. I have a whole bin of art supplies stationed above our fridge since Nat's art happens exclusively in the kitchen. That bin and its contents will have to be the subject of its own blog post. What I can say now is that art supplies can keep this child happy for up to an hour at a time, and it is glorious.

Breastfeeding 2.0
Although I could probably also write a whole post about breastfeeding Adam, I'll give you a quick update.

I briefly alluded in Adam's birth story to the fact that I have such better supply this time around. This is definitely thanks to him being with me since birth. This is also likely attributed to the fact that apparently in subsequent pregnancies many women have increased breast tissue. Whatever got me to this point, I am grateful. At Adam's two-week appointment he was already a full pound over his birth weight, which means we are not concerned about growth charts the way we were forced to be when Natalie wasn't up to her birth weight after three weeks of life.

Part of my routine each day is to meet my goal of pumping twice. Some days this happens, some days this doesn't. If both kids oblige me with a mid-day nap, then pumping is something I'm able to do fairly easily after putting Adam down (he's almost always asleep after Natalie gets down for her nap and rarely before she goes down). I had to relearn the fact that I should pump after feeding Adam, not before, and not an hour or two between feedings. This is one of those facts I forgot in the span of the last two years. I also pump at night while Matt is giving Adam a bottle. We've been successfully meeting our goal of having Matt give Adam one bottle a day, right now at night, so he gets accustomed to being fed by someone besides me. Of course, this means that I had to disregard the admonition of the lactation consultant at the hospital, who cautioned me against pumping or bottle feeding before Adam hit the one-month mark. He's still a couple days shy of one month, and I've been pumping practically since the day I returned home from the hospital, and he's been getting a bottle a day since he was about a week old. Breastfeeding has not suffered as a result -- no nipple confusion here. My philosophy with pumping and bottles is definitely to start as early as possible. That means that I now have in our freezer after about four weeks of pumping as much as I ever had in the freezer throughout Natalie's entire life. This will come in handy in the next couple weeks as I resume my work schedule.

As a quick sidenote, the pump itself has turned into a symbol of the latest healthcare legislation. When Natalie was born I rented a hospital-grade pump -- the Ameda Elite -- from where I delivered and kept extending the rental until Natalie was over 10 months old. I planned to do the same thing this time around, but then I discovered that the hospital I delivered at with Natalie no longer carries that pump for rental, and the prices for Ameda pump rentals from there have increased dramatically. Remembering too that under the Affordable Care Act legislation women are able to get coverage for breast pumps, I looked into what my insurance offers. After getting conflicting information from six sources -- the HR person at my husband's work, the head nurse at my practice, two customer service reps through our insurance (whose statements contradicted what our statement of benefits says), our insurance's lactation consultant, and finally my own doctor -- I realized that because our insurance plan was "grandfathered in" and because the employer mandate does not kick in until 2015 (though the individual coverage mandate kicked in this year) I was going to get zilch in the way of breast pump coverage.

Wanting to have a breast pump at our house the moment I got home from the hospital, I researched online breast pump rental options. The best deal I could find came from the AmedaDirect website, which allows users to rent an Ameda Elite pump for 6 months at $240. This offer also includes free shipping (normally $15) and a free accessory kit (normally $50). This is the best deal, as monthly rentals run $50 and do not cover shipping or the accessory kit. So, we're paying for my pump rental out-of-pocket with no hope of reimbursement, but in the grand scheme this is fairly cheap. I know I could buy a single-user pump for the same cost (or even less) but I just love this breast pump. Yes, loving a breast pump is an oxymoron I suppose, but hey, it's super-duper efficient so it takes me just minutes to pump a lot of milk. Renting from the AmedaDirect site has been really easy -- I did not, as the site suggests, have to send in the rental agreement via snail mail but instead scanned and emailed the completed form, and then the pump shipped out the same day I sent the email, arriving at our house within three days of placing the order.

The dual nap
Natalie has been taking one nap per day since right around the time she turned one year old. She goes down for this nap sometime between 12:30 and 1 on a typical day. I've been trying to get Adam to oblige me with a solid mid-day nap at the same time. Yesterday he did not, so I held him for the two and a half hours Natalie was sleeping. Not bad, but not productive. Today, though, he's contentedly snoozing in his room while Natalie tries to fall asleep. Whether Natalie really falls asleep or not during her nap is a little up in the air lately. She used to religiously sleep for about two and a half hours for her nap, falling asleep within moments of me leaving her room, but now she seems to be entertaining herself and taking an hour or more to fall asleep. She's clearly tired when I leave her, but she's no doubt experiencing a little sleep interference thanks to her brother's arrival (they do share a wall, after all). Whether she sleeps or not, though, Natalie is quiet and content in her crib, and she needs this quiet time in order to make it happily to bed time.

When the dual nap occurs, I can eat lunch using both my hands. If there's no dual nap then I need to figure out what I can easily eat in stages, often while standing. Thankfully, the dual nap occurs more often than not.

Because Natalie stays in her crib until at least 3 p.m., and because Matt is usually able to be home from work between 3 and 3:30, the afternoon is pretty manageable. It will not be as easy in a couple weeks when I resume my afternoon and evening work schedule, as Matt will have to rush home, walk the dogs and be ready for a dual-baby hand off within a matter of minutes before I have to get to work, but he will figure out a way to make it work just as I'm learning to care for two kids during the first half of the day.

Nighttime "routine"
Although we're raising Adam in almost an identical way to how we raised Natalie as a newborn, here's something that's different: Natalie stayed in her bassinet next to our bed for about six weeks, whereas Adam spent a little more than two weeks next to our bed before we decided it was time to make the switch. I am way less concerned about whether or not he's breathing (I watched Natalie in the middle of the night like a hawk) because I know that worrying isn't going to change anything. That helped making his transition to his bassinet in his nursery less difficult for me. Adam? He did not notice the change at all. I'm glad we did this as early as we did. I'm sleeping better, Matt's sleeping better, and Adam wasn't affected positively or negatively -- he's just a typical newborn.

One aspect of newborn life that Matt and I kind of forgot is that newborns don't have much of a routine when it comes to sleep and "bedtime" (what is bedtime to a newborn? Isn't their life one perpetual bedtime?). So, we tried a couple weeks ago to get Adam to go to sleep for the night starting around 8 p.m. so we could enjoy some evening adult time. After a few nights of doing what Matt correctly dubbed "chasing our own tails" as it would take a couple hours to get Adam to go to sleep, we finally realized we needed to accept the fact that for at least the next few months we don't get an evening break. We have to trade off who's eating dinner when and live with the fact that one, if not both, of us will be eating cold food.

With Matt back at work, though, we have been trying to change Adam for bed and give Adam a bottle sometime between 9:30 and 10. Ideally, Adam would fall asleep after having a 3-ounce bottle, and then he'd stay asleep for at least a few hours. But, nights like last night remind me that Adam is most content breastfeeding. So, he took the bottle, but then he fussed, and fussed, and fussed. Traditional soothing methods did not calm him down, so I resorted to doing what I do not like to do and breastfed him for comfort rather than nutrition. He barely fed -- because of course he was totally full -- but he did fall asleep within a matter of minutes.

So last night Adam slept for 3.5 hours, then woke up at 2 a.m., breastfed for 15 minutes, and immediately fell back asleep in his bassinet for another two hours. He woke up at 4:30 a.m., breastfed again for another 15 minutes, but wouldn't fall back asleep in his bassinet. Not wanting to experience what we did a couple weeks ago when it would take him at least two hours at a time to fall asleep each time he'd wake up in the middle of the night, I resorted to putting him to sleep in his swing. He slept contentedly in there for another 3.5 hours. This is, for the record, one of his best nights of sleep. Although I don't like to put him anywhere but his bassinet at night, I need to remember -- as my current rereading of my favorite baby book, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, reminds me -- that there's really no such thing as establishing bad habits for a baby under four months old. A line I reread last night said to "do whatever is necessary to get your baby to sleep." Duly noted!

Sometimes I wonder if Adam is going to be a good sleeper or not. It's way too early to tell. But I am meticulously tracking his eating and sleeping habits on my iBaby Log app just as I did with Natalie. I can still see all of Natalie's data from two years ago. It's reassuring to see that Adam and Natalie are so far practically identical in their newborn sleep habits. In fact, Adam wins bonus points for the fact that he's willing to take at least one nap a day in his bassinet in the nursery, whereas Natalie basically never did that for the first six weeks of her life, and rarely even took naps in her crib before she was four months old.

Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses?
I'm writing this blog post on a good day after a really good night, so I know it sounds like my life is easy and everything is perfect. And my life is pretty easy and I am pretty lucky as well. But I've also just spared you from another post I drafted on a really crappy day. It sounded really complain-y, so I'm happy to have something real but less annoying to share.

Also, I have yet to venture out of the house with the two kids by myself. That experiment will take place later this week when we (attempt to) attend Natalie's music class. We have done plenty of family-of-four outings, and Matt is getting the hang of the Baby Bjorn carrier we borrowed from our friends (I'm still rocking the Ergo, but Matt's not comfortable getting that on by himself, hence the Bjorn loan). So, for now, while I contentedly hang out at home with two kids, I feel like I have things somewhat under control and will wait to tackle the next challenge of the outside the house adventure in a couple days.

Sleep: our secrets

As I've stated before, Natalie is a champion sleeper, and everybody asks us to reveal our secret. Matt always says it's 95% luck, but I think we deserve a little more credit than that. I'd say it's 75% luck and genetics, but I think it's 25% the work we do to try to maintain a lifestyle that is conducive to a sleeping baby's schedule. Here's that 25% as I see it.

All credit for that final 25% must be given to the book Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Dr. Marc Weissbluth and our attempts to follow his philosophy. I am so glad I settled in for several nights with this book before giving birth because it is the closest thing we have to a secret for sleep success. If you do nothing to prepare for the birth or adoption of a child I recommend reading this book. Even if you don't go out and buy diapers or a bassinet, at least read this book.

Here are some of the major take-away points from Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child:

1) Sleep begets sleep. If you only remember one idea from this book, it would be this one. Essentially, Weissbluth's point is that when children nap better during the day, they sleep better at night. Babies go from three naps, to two naps, to one nap, and they hold on to that one nap for years, well into the preschool years (or graduate school years, or life, as Matt likes to call it...he naps like a champ).

2) Early bedtimes lead to better sleep. Instinctively, we might think that keeping our babies up later in the evening would lead to them waking up later in the morning. But most parents quickly discover that no matter what time children go to bed at night they tend to wake up at the same time each morning. We have tested this out a couple times and it is true in our experience.

3) Consistency and routines are key. This to me is the most obvious of his main points as it seems to be a theme of all things parenting. A nighttime routine signals to the baby that it's time to start winding down.

4) Sleep training may begin at four months of age, when babies are capable of self soothing. Before four months parents need to really just read the baby's cues, though they can begin to start establishing bedtime routines.

5) Crying it out can be effective with babies who are at least four months old. Although most parents do not like the idea of crying it out, if done correctly, it often takes just a few unpleasant nights of using the technique before a baby learns to go to sleep. Crying it out does not mean simply letting your baby scream until he's so worn out he just falls to sleep. Instead, it involves going to check on the baby and soothe him after five minutes, and then if the baby continues to cry checking on him and soothing him after another 10 minutes, and then after another 15 minutes, and so on, until the baby is asleep. A key point here is that soothing does not involve picking the baby up, which is likely exactly what he wants, but instead involves talking to him quietly, holding his hand, generally reassuring him that you're there.

6) There are chapters about sleep for toddlers, children, and teenagers, which I didn't even bother with yet, but it's good to know they're there should we encounter problems down the road.

We have followed the guidelines in this book as well as we possibly can, and the result truly has been a baby with healthy sleep habits who appears to be happy. And, we can say it's led to two very happy parents. It hasn't been sunshine and rainbows and unicorns every single day, but the general progression of Natalie's sleep habits has been amazing.

Here's Natalie's sleeping timeline:

The early days
Weeks 1 through 6 she was a typical newborn, waking up every three hours to eat. There were a few rough nights thrown into that mix, where she seemingly woke up every hour, but those were a major exception.

Sleeping through the night
Using the term "sleeping through the night" to mean six hours of uninterrupted sleep, Natalie officially slept through the night when she was six weeks old (on Saturday, February 25, to be exact). As I wrote when this phenomenon occurred, this was followed by a pattern of amazing nights of six or eight hours of uninterrupted sleep as well as a couple horrible nights of basically not sleeping. In retrospect, the uncertainty of the 6-8 week range and her general fussiness during the day made it the most difficult time of Natalie's post-hospital life thus far.

New sleeping quarters
After a week of decent night sleeping we moved Natalie to her crib Saturday, March 3 when she was 7 weeks old.

Bedtimes
By mid-March when Natalie was a little over two months old and had been sleeping in her crib for a couple weeks she started to establish a new 9-9:30 bedtime for herself. Gone were the days of going out to dinner late and knowing that our baby would just put herself to sleep in her car seat while we finished our meal.

Natalie's self-imposed bedtimes became progressively earlier until by her three month birthday she needed to be in bed by 7 p.m. I distinctly remember taking Natalie out to dinner with my friend on April 5 and meeting at 7 p.m. That will go down in the record books as the last time baby Natalie could go out at that time. By the next week that wouldn't have been possible.

Night feedings
When Natalie moved to her crib a little before she turned two months old she was still waking up at least one time at night to feed. Often she would wake up at 3 or 4 a.m., be up for a short 15-minute feeding or a long 45-minute feeding, and then immediately put herself back to bed. Then she'd usually wake up again in the 6 to 6:30 range, eat, and then sleep again. At this stage in Natalie's life I would bring her into bed with me for the 6:30 feeding, and then she and I would continue to sleep in my bed until about 9 or 9:30. This pattern of sleeping lasted until she turned four months old, and that was a glorious experience. I know people have strong opinions about co-sleeping, but I viewed this as our co-napping time and I loved it. I knew there would be a short window of opportunity for me to cuddle with Natalie in this way, and I'm glad I did this with her when I could.

Weird red-toned photo (thanks to our red curtains) from the last time Natalie and I co-napped

Crying it out
The world changed when Natalie turned four months old. That's when she seemed to come to life. That's when she really started playing with her toys, paying attention to people when they were talking or singing, and getting distracted while nursing. It's also when I knew that, according to the book, we could start true sleep training. In retrospect it seems appropriate that we're encouraged to attempt having babies cry it out right when the world opens up to them because they're suddenly impressed by everything and therefore have to learn how to tune out all the stimuli around them when it's time for bed.

Before Natalie turned four months old it seemed like she fell asleep the moment her head hit the mattress. At four months, though, she would start to fight sleep. So we tried having Natalie cry it out. This method worked like a charm on Natalie. The longest we had to let her cry was 15 minutes and then she was out.

Dropping the night feedings -- Honest to goodness for real sleep
Now here we are at five and a half months, and we've been fortunate to say that for the past six weeks Natalie has been sleeping from 7 p.m. to 6 or 7 a.m. every day with a few exceptions. Right around the four month mark Natalie started to drop the night feedings. Granted, in the last six weeks there have been a few times she's wanted to eat sometime around 4 or 5 a.m., but those have been the exceptions. Most nights she is getting 11 to 12 hours of uninterrupted sleep. And when I say uninterrupted, let me throw out there the fact that she is often making noise in the middle of the night, but it is not the kind of prolonged noise that indicates she actually needs something. Instead, I almost liken it to her waking up from a bad dream. For example, Wednesday night she was completely asleep by 7 p.m., but then she started crying around 9:30 p.m. After a few minutes of crying, before I even thought of checking on her, she was back to sleep. She also made noise at 5 a.m., but again within a matter of minutes was back to sleep. Learning not to respond to every little noise Natalie makes has been key to her sleep training.

A nap schedule
I have struggled to define a nap schedule for the majority of Natalie's life because in the early days there really was no difference between napping and sleeping at night, and then as Natalie got older she'd sort of just sleep when she felt like it. It wasn't until the four month mark, when we knew we'd had major success with night sleeping, that I even bothered to consider a more consistent napping schedule.

At Natalie's current developmental stage most babies are taking three naps a day. Only in the last couple weeks can I say that Natalie has a defined morning nap and early afternoon nap. We are still working on having a consistent third nap, but maybe Natalie's general refusal to settle down at this time of day is her way of telling us she doesn't need a third nap because she has an early bedtime and a reliable nighttime schedule.

Right now Natalie seems to be taking a two-hour nap from approximately 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. The she's ready for a nap around 12:30 p.m., and will typically stay asleep until 2 or 2:30. But then that leaves this long stretch of day, with her awake for another 4-5 hours, which is rather challenging. She still can't sit up on her own, so entertaining her in the afternoon typically involves lots of holding her, carrying her, or taking her on walks.

Yesterday we took her to the pool at 5:30 to see if she would really enjoy that and it could give us some sanity during the worst time of the day, but she hated it, so she screamed a good amount. Right as we were getting ready to leave she fell asleep in her car seat, so Matt and I decided to stay at the pool for another 45 minutes while she napped (I was not about to wake her). So maybe we need to go to the pool every day at 5:15 and get her to sleep in her car seat?

The challenge of consistency
Matt and I base our lives around Natalie's nighttime sleep schedule, not in a scary our-baby-must-be-asleep-by-7-p.m.-or-the-world-will-end kind of way, but we just know that most nights we are going to be at home from about 6:30 p.m. on so we hunker down. We also know increasingly that she needs to be at home in her crib for her early morning and mid-day naps. So when we want to do something later in the night (usually in honor of a special occasion) we ask my mom to come over and babysit. On regular nights we know that if we want to go out to dinner we just need to get the early bird special and be there at 5 p.m. Or if we want to meet someone for lunch, it's probably better to call it brunch at meet at 11 a.m., right between naps. There have been a few times that we've broken with this schedule, and ultimately everything turns out fine, but it still means dealing with a cranky baby who gets less sleep, which means a mom who gets less sleep too.

You keep me up past my bedtime and I refuse to look cute for a photo.

I'm crabby.

Early bird special.

Though staying consistent is a major challenge, it is something we've built our lives around lately, and for that I give us credit. So while maybe 75% of our success has to do with pure luck of the draw, I do think applying the principles from this book has impacted our baby's sleep habits, and I don't think it can all be attributed to random chance.

Healthy sleep habits, mostly happy baby.

Newborn sleep: Predictably unpredictable

Here's a prediction: This is the first of many times I will write about sleep.

In my experience as a mom of seven weeks, get two or more new moms together and a significant portion of the conversation will come back to newborn sleep habits. How much does your baby sleep during the day? At night? What's the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep you've gotten at night? How do you soothe your baby during the day? At night?

We do this, I think, not to compare our babies in the "my baby is better than your baby sense" but rather to see if we are at all within the range of normal and if other women have any wisdom to pass on to us.

My baby is not better than your baby, but she is awesome!

The unfortunate answer to these questions is that there is no such thing as normal and what works one day may not work the next.

The other unfortunate answer is that the absolute earliest "sleep training" can occur is at three months, and true sleep training likely won't occur until four months. At three months parents can, according to the experts, set up routines that encourage better sleep habits, but because the majority of babies can't self-soothe until they hit the four-month range there is not much parents can do but grin and bear their babe's sleep cycles.

I've acquired quite a few books about baby sleep (including Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child; On Becoming Baby Wise; Secrets of the Baby Whisperer) that I'll discuss more in coming months (once they actually apply to us) but for newborn sleep there is really only one book everyone will tell you about: The Happiest Baby on the Block by Harvey Karp, M.D. My friend loaned me her copy along with the accompanying DVD.

There are a few ideas that emerge from this book that are worth noting:

1) A lot of babies confuse night and day thanks to their time in the womb.

2) Babies are born three months too early, so newborns enter the world during something Dr. Karp calls the "fourth trimester." His whole theory is that human babies must be born when they are born because of their enormous brain size (and subsequently enormous head size). They wouldn't be able to make it out of the birth canal if they waited any longer. This also helps explain why, compared to other mammal babies, human babies are especially helpless during their first few months of life. It's interesting to note, also, that a lot of babies begin to roll over during their fourth or fifth month of life.

3) Because babies are born too early parents can best get their babies to sleep by recreating the environment inside the womb. This does not seem like a particularly revolutionary idea, as much of what he suggests parents do is no doubt what our great grandparents did for our grandparents, but he does package his suggestions neatly into an easy-to-remember mnemonic device: The 5 S's. These stand for: swaddling, side/stomach cradling (on the parents' bodies, essentially), shhhhhhh, swinging, and sucking. Parents are encouraged to follow these steps in this order to get their babies to sleep.

After reading/skimming this book, though, I soon discovered: this book doesn't really apply to us. Dr. Karp's suggestions, while they work for all babies, are really targeted towards "colicky" babies. He takes issue with the word "colicky," believing it's more of a Western concept, but regardless in my opinion you can simply replace the word "colicky" with "fussy" and you wind up in the same place with his suggestions.

With the exception of a few nights and one memorable day last week calming Natalie has never really been the issue. She cries when she needs something -- to be fed, changed, or held -- and once her need is met she usually finds her happy place and gets to sleep relatively quickly. I like to thank her regimented schedule in the NICU -- where she was fed and changed every three hours on the dot -- for encouraging her to expect this as normal. Again, with the exception of a few nights, she has never anticipated getting fed every hour. And once she surpassed her birth weight when she hit three weeks of age we no longer felt the pressure to make certain she was waking up at least every three hours for nighttime feedings.

So we've been fortunate to get at least three-hour chunks of uninterrupted sleep at night with Natalie between the hours of about 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. This means I have not felt particularly sleep deprived since we've been home from the hospital.

So, I started to get greedy and wondered what I could do to get her to sleep even longer at night and move her to her crib in the nursery. The answer, of course, is that there's probably nothing I can do, seeing as she's only seven weeks old, but here's what we've been experiencing this week.

Saturday night
On Saturday night, at the recommendation of my friend Kate, I took Natalie's Pack N Play with the bassinet insert (where she's been sleeping at night) and moved it away from my side of the bed. It had been so close to the bed that I could just reach over and grab her at night. Kate suggested that before we move Natalie to her nursery we try moving the Pack N Play to the other side of our bedroom, as far from our bed as possible. When we did this last Saturday I told Matt this was the first step of sending Natalie away to college, and that first night her bassinet felt so far away she might as well have been off at college.

I also thought that if we fed her a lot at night right before bed that might help her sleep for a longer time, so we gave her a 5-ounce bottle. She typically gets about 3 ounces in a feeding, so 5 ounces seemed like it would surely hold her over.

 
At the recommendation of my friend Mimi we also gave her a bath right before bed. Before we were giving her a bath whenever she seemed like she would best tolerate it, seeing as bath time has not been her favorite time thus far.

Miraculously, that night she slept for 6.5 hours uninterrupted from 11 p.m. to 5:30 a.m.! Sleeping through the night for babies is defined as sleeping for 6 hours uninterrupted, so here we officially hit a milestone!

I thought I was on to something by combining the wisdom of Kate, Mimi and my own intuition. Of course, Saturday was a really busy day for Natalie as we had relatives visiting from both California and Richmond and Natalie got held for hours by 13 different people.

Sunday night
With the bassinet now in its semi-permanent location as far away from our bed as possible, Natalie had another 5-ounce bottle and a bath right before bed. This time she slept for 7 hours uninterrupted from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.!

Monday night
We repeated the pattern above and Natalie slept for 6 hours uninterrupted from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m.

Sleeping through the night puts us in our happy place! (Blurry newborn iPhone pictures = par for the course)

Tuesday night
Well, that all went out the window. I secretly hoped that after three nights in a row of sleeping through the night we had a new "normal." But then, after going to sleep at 9 p.m. she was making noise at 11 p.m. I thought to myself, "Baby, there is no way you could be hungry." So, I went over to her bassinet and looked at her for a while. She stopped whining. I went back to bed. She started whining at 11:15. Then at 11:30. Then at 11:45. These were not her all-out "I'm hungry" cries. Instead, these were true whimpers, her little fake-me-out noises that indicate she's basically not tired but doesn't really need anything either, which is the worst. Then she woke up at 12:30 a.m. for real needing to be changed and fed. Then she was up at 2 a.m. with the same needs. Then 4 a.m. Then I got her back to sleep until 8 a.m.

Wednesday night
This night was better than Tuesday night. She woke up twice at night to be fed, this time giving us 4 hours of sleep better feedings. This is basically "normal" for her, and it's really not bad at all. So I figured the sleeping through the night thing that we were blessed with for three nights in a row was just a random fluke and we'll stay in this 4-hours-of-sleep-at-a-time holding pattern until we can do real sleep training.

Thursday night
But then a funny thing happened last night. She slept for 8 hours uninterrupted! From 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. little girl slept so soundly I did, of course, have to go check on her a couple times to make sure she was exhibiting signs of life. There is a certain irony to the fact that even when she gets uninterrupted sleep I do not because I feel more of an urge to check on her.

This morning I came to a realization: Tuesday night and Wednesday night are the nights we skipped out on her bath. Coincide? Perhaps. Will she be getting a bath tonight? Absolutely!

Another thing I've noticed is that if Natalie sleeps a lot during the day she will wake up more at night. Yesterday I took her to the mall, we hung out with our friends Gretchen and Luke, and then we went to a party to watch our friend Susannah on Jeopardy. When Natalie gets good stimulation during the day, gets held by different people and doesn't sleep too long she seems to sleep better. Fortunately tonight she'll be going out on the town again to get some loving from a bunch of lady friends, and hopefully that can help encourage her to have another marathon sleep session. If good sleep habits continue I'd like to move Natalie to her crib in her nursery by next week.

Or not. Newborns are predictably unpredictable. And, by writing all this down and sharing it on this blog I have no doubt doomed us to a sleepless night.

6 weeks

So six weeks ago today I heard my baby scream for the first time as she was being pulled from my body.

Today that primal scream is back.


We have entered week 6, which according to quite a few moms I know and a book or two I've read is a difficult week.

Somehow we went from this...

...to this:

Like clockwork, today Natalie is being fussy and insisting on only being quiet when being held.

I tried the baby bouncer, which calmed her down for about two of the five minutes I was in the shower.

So we moved on to the Ergo carrier. I've used it on a couple shopping trips, including our solo expedition to the grocery store yesterday (we walked there and back and made a lot of elderly people very happy!). But now I've joined the league of moms who wear it around the house to soothe their baby to sleep and free up their hands for a bit.

All it took was about 25 minutes worth of Jack Johnson's Sing-Along Songs, an Ergo carrier, and plenty of mom dancing to get this baby to calm down.

It's just amazing to me that as soon as she hit six weeks she had her worst day. Maybe if Natalie stays this predictable we can cross our fingers that she'll magically be sleeping through the night as soon as we hit four months...right?