Tag Archives: naps

Sleep, My Elusive Old Friend

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I’ll start with a preemptive apology for and worse than normal grammatical errors and any worse than normal rambling and overall incoherence. I haven’t had a whole lot of sleep in the last few months. It began in the middle of pregnancy, though in those days I could still catch the occasional nap. Lukas started out as a very strong sleeper at birth, but the majority of his sleep took place during the day. It took us about two to two and a half months to switch him from sleeping those nice four hour stretches during the day to night time and even then there were a few nights where he quite literally woke up every thirty minutes needing the pacifier to plug the screaming hole in his face.

After two particularly crappy weeks of sleepless nights, I threw in the towel. After one midnight feeding, the next time he cried out, I simply closed the door to his room and then ours and I crashed for four hours. Kurt remarked how well I slept through the crying. I thought Lukas had eventually given in and that I had woken up to the sound of him starting up again. I had no idea the baby cried the entire time. This surely must be a sign of the stubbornness to come.

In the days leading up to Lukas’ four month birthday we were on a routine of him falling asleep at about ten at night, waking up three to four times a night, waking up for the day at about eight to eight thirty in the morning, and then only taking about three naps which lasted fifteen to thirty minutes. I didn’t feed him every time he woke up during the night, but still at four months old he should be able to sleep “through the night” without a feeding at all.

Lukas’ four-month baby wellness appointment was on Friday. The Boy weighs in at sixteen pounds. He is twenty-five and half inches tall/long, and his head circumference is sixteen and a half inches. He’s in the seventy fifth percentile across the board. He is currently wearing nine-month clothes because I can’t fit his melon head in six month clothes. He has reached all the milestones except the ability to roll over. He can recognize Kurt and I, which he has been able to do since he was two and half months old, he coos, smiles and laughs, and reaches for things. He can also self soothe. We can and do put him down for naps while he’s still awake. The boy just doesn’t sleep for very long, and will sometimes simply refuse to take a nap.

The doctor said it was absolutely fine to add some rice cereal to The Boy’s diet and that giving it to him just before bedtime should help reduce the number of times he interrupts my sleep with his nagging. That night we did just that and we put The Boy to bed at the same time Sophia goes to bed, eight. He didn’t like the cereal much and liked the bedtime even less. He only cried for half an hour but then started up again at nine or nine thirty. That lasted another hour before he finally got the hint. The next night he was quiet until nine but only cried for about fifteen minutes. Both nights he still woke three to four times. On the third night he went to bed without a fuss and only woke once. I wasn’t so lucky the fourth night. Putting him to bed isn’t an issue. Keeping him asleep for more than two hours is. I’m going to need tea that is a lot more caffeinated if this continues.

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Baby Cage Struggles

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Until a few weeks ago, naps and bedtimes were no big deal. We went though the routines for each and Sophia knew what to expect and what was expected. Then suddenly along with diaper changes before it, naps became a struggle with kicking legs, running off, and general squirminess. I began carrying her to the crib like a kicking and screaming football, standing back up as I ran out of the room. She would pitch a fit in her crib for about ten minutes and then lay down and talk to her stuffed animals. More than half the time she would fall asleep within thirty minutes, but the struggles beforehand were exhausting for me. So what did I finally do about it? I set her free of course.

Friday I finally took down the side of the crib and replaced it with the board that turns it into a toddler bed. Sophia of course ‘helped’ me. She kept track of the screws and handed them to me as I needed them. The ones I didn’t need right away she tried pushing into the empty holes and blocked me from being able to align the board. Her ‘help’ really made the transformation about twice as long as necessary, but she was happy about the whole thing. She took her fist nap in her toddler bed on Friday without any problems. She happily crawled right into bed. Thanks to my aunt I even have a way to ensure Sophia won’t roll out of bed. My aunt made Sophia a twin-size baby quilt. I have it folded in half, put Sophia in the quilt sandwich with the fold on the outside, and tuck in the two loose edges on the opposite side.

Sophia's new toddler bed

We used to leave Bear, Moose, and Friend in her crib all day unless she requested them. We actually forced her to request each by name, “a Bow”, “en Moose”, “en Fend-EE”. Sometimes she was in such a bad mood that she didn’t want to say anything, but needed them for comfort so she used signs for the two that we know, Bear and Friend. On one occasion, two months ago, she became so angry with me for forcing her to say or sign for her comfort items that she decided to get whichever ones she could reach. Bear was close to the side, so with one hand she reached in, grabbed him, and lifted him to the top of the crib bars. With her other hand she reached over the top and removed him from her first hand. She glared at me as if to say, “This! This is what I want. Now get me my other stuff. Chop Chop!” I was thoroughly impressed with her problem solving skills, but not so much with the lack of speech. She finally had to break down and request the other items. On Saturday after the cage came down, she asked for her friends by name, and I told her she could get them all herself now. “OH!” She said.

Sophia showing the new 2010 toddler bed

The past two mornings I’ve heard the sounds of a waking toddler and waited a few minutes to see if she would come out of her room on her own. After a few more minutes, I open her door to see she’s sitting up still in bed. It seems that, at least for now, she needs our permission to leave her invisible confines.

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Night Terrors or Parental Button Pressing

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I’m going to blame Sophia for my not blogging for a few weeks. I know. I know, “Sure, blame the poor kid.” Well it is her fault. I usually get my down time in the evening after she goes to bed, but for the last three weeks, she has held screaming sessions in her crib for hours after lights out time. I’ve tried to switch my quiet time to the morning before she gets up, but instead of sleeping in the darling angel has also began to wake up an hour earlier. Due to the lack of sleep, I’ve been catching up at her nap times which have been unaffected so far. Yay for naps!

Bed time for the midget is eight. She usually goes down without much fuss. Normally she will stay up for up to two hours talking to herself and hitting the walls with her feet. For the last three weeks, she has gone to bed and lay quietly for an hour, then start crying, and then screaming as if something is killing her with a dull spoon. Why a spoon? Because it’s DULL, you twit. It’ll hurt more. Sophia screams until eleven or midnight and then wakes up at six thirty. It’s been hell!

The first couple times it happened I assumed that she had been asleep and woke from a nightmare. I didn’t *rush* to her rescue but did calmly go in, pick her up and rock with her. Her screaming would stop as soon as she was picked up and she would lay her head on my shoulder. I sat with her for a few minutes and then put her back to bed. She would remain quiet for ten or fifteen minutes and then the lamenting and gnashing of teeth would begin again.

She now has all her toddler teeth, so we don’t think it’s teething. It could be growing pains, but generally, those don’t go on EVERY night for weeks. Kurt thought maybe she’s been getting too much sleep with her two to three hour naps and started putting her to bed at nine. It worked the first night, but I think that was just a fluke. After a couple weeks of these antics, something had to give and she would eventually have to make up for the lost sleep. I’m still waiting. The next night she went to bed at nine and presumably to sleep. Screaming commenced at midnight and lasted until four in the morning. I was not amused.

We’ve had some very hot sunny days around here and our bedrooms are on the third floor. On the hot days we turn a fan on in her room and have tried that to combination with a cool bath before bed. That hasn’t been a consistent success either. The only other thing I can think of is that she’s vying for night time attention. The most she gets anymore is a stern, “Sophia GO TO SLEEP” through the door. Stubborn little shit. This will end eventually, right?

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Nighttime sleep

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Before we changed the rules on Sophia and started sending her to bed at eight at night, I would nurse her when she became hungry at around nine. Then I sit there holding and rocking her until she was in a deep enough sleep that her body was limp and I could tip toe to her crib gently setting her down usually at ten but sometimes at eleven/midnight/or the always lovely two in the morning. Now I can reliably go upstairs do our half-hour routine and set her in her crib half awake without doing specially choreographed dancing around eggshells type of maneuvers. Sometimes she falls asleep right away and other times we’ll hear, “ah-heh ah-heh” for a few minutes before she’s out.

From birth she’s been really good about sleeping at night only waking me once a night for a feeding and then going back to sleep for another four hours. Up until last night going back to sleep meant she got to sleep next to mom.  Dad would enter in the morning to see us side by side sleeping in the same position. I never intended to start “co-sleeping” but when we first brought her home I didn’t want to be away from her at all. I was also afraid I wouldn’t wake up to her cries until she’d been at it for hours if I slept in another room. After a month and Kurt went back to work I still slept on the spare bed in her room so that Kurt wouldn’t be disturbed in the middle of the night, but when I wake up on a Saturday morning such as this Saturday to her turning her head back and forth so hard that she actually scoots herself up to me and then continues pounding her head into my spine till I wake up, it’s time for me to sleep in my own room. Last night I thought I’d try it. I even put her back in her crib half awake after her 2:30 feeding and all I heard was, “ah-heh ah-heh” and she was out! Yay!

This afternoon Kurt put her down in her crib for a nap. She started to wail, but it only lasted a minute and she was asleep. WOO!! Now if only I could have her let me sleep past 6:30 in the mornings. :P

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Baby sleep battles

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Monday last week at Sophia’s doctor appointment he checked her ears and throat and all is well.  Friday and Saturday were actually her worse two days although she was a little grumpy on Sunday.  By Monday, all she had left of her cold was a runny nose.  The doctor said that we could always give her some baby Tylenol because she can get the same achy pains adults do with their colds.

While we were in the office, we told the nurse about Sophia’s napping habits or lack thereof.  There have been times the child has stayed up for 12 to 14 hours straight, or only had a couple ten-minute naps during the day.  She might fall asleep when nursing but as soon as I set her down she’s wide-awake, and I’m not about to hold her ALL DAY LONG.  Car rides usually work but we didn’t invest in one of those detachable infant carriers so she wakes up when the ride is over and we actually have to go in the store or back in the house.

The non-sleeping little bastard

Picture taken 12/30/2007. The non-sleeping little bastard. :)

I use a front pack when I go grocery shopping that she’ll sometimes fall asleep then too, but getting back into the car wakes her up again.  I know those detachable infant car seat carriers make things easier when at a restaurant and just going in and out of the car to run errand all over town without disturbing the baby, but then you have to carry the weight of the seat and the child and that gets HEAVY!  I’d rather carry a 15-pound baby against my body than a 15-pound baby with a 10-pound seat by hand.  Those seats can be expensive and aren’t used for very long anyway.  Sophia will be able to sit up on her own in about three months (probably less) so she’ll be able to sit in restaurant highchairs and shopping carts soon besides, her lack of napping is more of a problem on the days that I stay home. – I haven’t figured that one out either.

I would wear the front pack around the house but about the only chore I can do with it on is vacuum the house and we don’t have much carpet.  I’ve tried hauling laundry up and down the stairs with her in the front pack and I do ok, but I don’t think bending down to put clothes into the drier is good for my back, and folding laundry would require much longer arms.  The same goes for doing dishes and loading the dishwasher with her attached to my front.

So the doctor gave us a printout that was meant to help parents get their baby to bed at night, but he said we might be able to get some tips from it for napping.  Because that day Sophia had not slept at all during the day we took the opportunity to use the suggested techniques to switch her usual bedtime from 10pm to 8pm.  This special technique was basically – put the kid to bed and let her cry herself to sleep.  Oh GOD was it hard!

It said to develop a bedtime routine that starts about thirty minutes before bedtime and that the baby needs to associate the crib with falling sleep instead of falling asleep in my arms.  She also needs to learn to calm herself to sleep without me holding her, swaying, driving, using “white noise”, standing on my head, or juggling axes lest she later learns to wake up in the middle of the night without needing to be fed and require me to juggle the axes some more.

The routine I started was to change her diaper, put her in nightclothes, close the curtains, put some of her baby things away for the night, turn on the nightlight, and offer to nurse her even if she just ate thirty minutes ago.   I nursed her until she showed her usual sign of not being hungry which is to attach and detach A LOT and look up and smile at me.  The looking up and smiling at me is what made the next step so incredible difficult because she was being all cute and sweet and here I am about to do something that I know she’ll hate.  I put her in her crib still awake like the magic doctor sheet said to do.  I kissed her and told her goodnight.  She smiled and cooed.  Oh why do you have to make it so difficult?  I made the “goodnight” brief just like the magic doctor paper said and I left the room.  She quietly entertained herself for a few minutes and then the crying, screaming and crocodile tears began. According to our directions, we were to check on the baby every five to fifteen minutes and talk softly to her without any harshness in our voices.  Visits should be brief and boring.  We could give her kisses, hold her hands, etc.  But under no circumstances were we to pick her up (well ok maybe if there’s a fire we can pick her up).  We were to only be in the room for a minute and you know that Kurt was very precise following each guideline to the letter.  I pointed out that our directions gave no time limit for the whole process.  I mean at what point each night do you just give in and start over the next night?  Because she eats about every two hours during the day we decided if she isn’t asleep in that time I could pick her up to feed and change her.  Every ten minutes we took turns to go check on her.  On my turns, Kurt came with me because he didn’t trust that I wouldn’t pick her up and only stay a minute.  The torture ended after an hour and a half when Sophia threw in the towel.

I didn’t follow this technique with naps because to try it four times a day would just drive me insane and I think it would just be too much.  Despite me not changing anything during the day, Tuesday was a breeze.  She took three good naps (each lasting about an hour) and fell asleep within thirty minutes that night.  Wednesday she took three ok naps (each only lasting about 30 minutes) and took an hour and a half to fall asleep that night.  Thursday was a no nap day and it took an hour and a half to get her to sleep that night.  I blame Kurt for falling for the old, “I need a drink of water” routine.  On one of his turns to check on Sophia, he checked to see if she was hungry by letting her use his pinky as a pacifier.  He didn’t realize that’s all she was doing was using it to calm herself.  I tried to nurse her and knew right away that she wasn’t actually hungry but I sat with her anyway just as much for her comfort as my own.  Friday and Saturday night we only had to check on her once on each night.  Sunday night she actually prompted me to check the time when she started to fall asleep while nursing – it was 7:30!  Not only was she right on cue but that night she slept right through the night for NINE AND A HALF HOURS STRAIGHT!!  Monday night and tonight she fell right to sleep on her own.  Each night the screaming a wailing became more fussing than calling out to save her life which was nice, and with exception to Saturday she did pretty well with naps too.

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Icebox house, breastfeeding, and other clothing adventures

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Tuesday I woke up to a cold house. In the morning I blew it off as a cold snap outside that my furnace would soon compensate for, but a couple hours later it was still cold. Our house is a tri-level and each floor has its own temperature zone that varies about five to ten degrees from the floor below or above. I usually hang out on the third floor since it’s always the warmest. I went downstairs to try overriding the energy saver thermostat thing but nothing happened, and damn was it frickin’ cold down there! The thermostat read 60 degrees (Fahrenheit), but I really don’t think it was even that warm. Sophia was fussy all day and wouldn’t let me put her down anywhere because every surface was cold. She didn’t take any naps ans wouldn’t sleep even though she was wearing three layers and I was holding her. By two o’clock I had enough and had realized that I had not heard the furnace kick on once through the whole day.

I called Kurt at work a little ticked off because I thought he had programmed some funky cold temperature only comfortable to him and anyone used to living in a medieval castle. “How the hell do you change the temperature on this thing?” He gave me the instructions, but that was exactly what I had tried earlier. He asked me to check the circuit breaker. I was frustrated holding a phone in one hand and fussy monkey baby in the other, so I was too impatient to try and cipher the scrawl on the panel from twenty-seven years ago. “I have one thing to do and I’ll come right home.” He said. He’s so sweet (sometimes). In the mean time I wondered where we would stay if the furnace needed to be replaced, and oh god that would be another expense on a house we want to move out of soon!

It turned out to be the circuit breaker – the house warmed up, and Sophia slept all evening. Amazingly, I was still able to get her to bed at her usual 10pm that night. Unfortunately, morning wakeup came early on Wednesday. That’s ok, I can play zombie mom. It’s my own fault for staying up late to play with blog stuff. Actually, I got quite a bit done on Wednesday morning. I even had a shower by 9am. At ten I called a friend to explain some blog things to her (I helped her with a WordPress blog that I will more formally present once she has a little more to read – in the mean time if anyone in the Seattle are needs an event coordinator let me know ;-) ).

My friend and I went out to lunch a couple hours later and I woke up my napping baby to go from the car to the restaurant. I didn’t think it was a big deal since she usually goes back to sleep easily when I’m carrying/holding her. Sophia was great up until my food arrived and she decided she was hungry as well. Up until this point, I haven’t even attempted feeding her in public. I usually take her to the car if I need to feed her; it just seems more private that way. What’s odd is that before having a baby I had no problem flashing my little booblets around. Somehow feeding my baby seems like a private thing almost like going to the bathroom but a lot less disgusting. It’s either that or it’s because my previous booblets seemed harmless where as my new super-sized milk producing machines could put an eye out. I don’t know. Either way I haven’t mastered the technique necessary for private feeding and I made this my first attempt. It didn’t go well. I think I managed the privacy part well, but apparently, Sophia can’t find my nipple in the dark. I took the shrieking monster and my baby-blanket-covered-self outside to the car while my friend had my food boxed up for me (thank you). Sophia stopped screaming the minute I left the restaurant. I don’t know if it was the cold air, she liked that I was walking, or if the busy favorite lunch spot was just too loud for her to concentrate on eating. She happily ate in the quiet car and fell asleep.

I drove to a park, finished my lunch and then went to the store. I went to the store to buy a Christmas gift (which I did get), but I also bought a cute Christmas-y red suit for Sophia. She now has two Christmas outfits. Later in the day I found out Kurt almost bought the same outfit when he stopped at the same store after work. :P She has him so wrapped around her little finger. The day I posted the photo on this Wordless Wednesday he came home and told me he didn’t get any work done because he spent the whole day staring at her.

When Sophia and I got home, I fed her again while she made coffee percolating sounds in her pants. Time to change the baby – OHMYGOD – she shit herself up to her nipples – literally! Usually when she has a blowout, I’m able to roll her onesie up in a way that no poop touches her face as I pull it over her head – no such luck this time. Thankfully her onesie jumped on that bomb and contained the bulk of it. I didn’t notice right away but apparently my clothes weren’t spared from all of the fallout, and now for our unscheduled baby bath accompanied by blood curdling screams. For the first month or so of her life Sophia screamed bloody murder if you changed her diaper, but didn’t mind baths at all – that’s not the case now. Now it’s the reverse for both.

I got her dressed, re-dressed myself and fed her again. She fell asleep just before dad got home, and was completely out for four hours! I took a little nap too because I knew there would be little sleep for me later! I’m new, but I’m not completely daft.

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