Knocked Up : sleep battles

The Cranky Early Bird

knockedup — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:48:00 GMT

Axel's an early riser. He does not seem to be a morning person, though. He rises at 6:30 and promptly starts screaming.

I'm not sure why he starts yelling. Is he shocked that the sun's rising earlier and earlier each day? Angry that he can't see the moon through his window? Upset that morning means he's going to have to take off his adorable sock monkey pajamas? Bummed that he's in his crib, with nothing but Good Dog, Carl, a book he's read so often that he could reproduce the pictures in Crayolas if his hand-eye coordination would catch up with his memory, and a stuffed lion that has the same damn straight-mouthed expression on his face every day?

This yelling occurs if he's pooped his pants or if he's saving his poop until sixty seconds before we're ready to rush out the door. He could be hungry when he wakes up, but the yelling doesn't seem to correlate with a half a multigrain waffle or a four waffle breakfast. It happens if he's up at 5:45 or if it's one of those rare days when the gods willed him to snooze until 7:00 am.

It doesn't matter if he's fallen asleep easily after a few stories and singing lullabies to himself, as he does most nights, or if he fought the dreamland express with all his might. He could've had a good night without so much as a peep, or a bad night with multiple wakings and a 2 - 4 am stretch of fierce battle (like he did this Friday. Not my idea of a fun late night, especially when I'm fighting off a nasty cold) with his parents, heavy eyelids, and everything else that dares to cross his sleepy, pissed off path.

Basically, it's got me baffled. Why doesn't he wake up, stretch, rub his eyes, and take a gander at old familiar Good Dog, Carl just to make sure everything's still OK, and then peep, "Bahoogarsth", his current favorite nonsense word? I've had visions of sweet little morning Axel telling stories to his stuffed lion, rolling around in his crib, taking his time recalling his dreams, and then going in, scooping him up, and getting a big kiss. Instead, the silence of sleep is broken by yells and sobs barreling through the monitor, and I arrive at his room to find a teary-eyed, morning-loathing toddler.

The transition from sleep to waking is often hard for him post-nap as well. Four out of five naps end with Axel waking up and sobbing/screaming. I find waking up from naps to be pretty hard myself - there's that bleary-eyed, heavy-headed transition from sleep to wakefullness that's hard to navigate at 3 in the aternoon. This, too, doesn't seem to be connected to any outside factors that I can figure.

Maybe it's bedbugs. It could be a monster in the closet that comes out right when Axel wakes up, shakes his hairy fists and gnashes his teeth, then slunks back behind the stack of baby wipes. Or, he could just be tired of being in his room, though he appears to like his room and his crib most of the time.

Have any of you experienced these sorts of regularly rocky mornings? Any thoughts on what it could be?

Baby Rage

knockedup — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 22:05:00 GMT

Axel still gets mad when he's tired, and even more mad when someone tries to help him address the problem of exhaustion by encouraging him to sleep. He screams and cries and then, a few minutes later, a switch gets flipped and he's suddenly silent and asleep. There's no winding down - it's yell yell yell yell yell yell yell zzzzzzzz.

The other night, Sean was reading the great classic The Grouchy Ladybug to Axel. Axel likes to speed-read, so there's just enough time to repeat, "Wanna fight?" or identify the sparrow on the page before moving on to the next page. Once the ladybugs were happily eating aphids together, Sean offered Axel a bottle. Axel drank a little and sweetly, angellically, nuzzled into his father's chest. Then he decided he wanted a little more milk and did his adorable open bird-mouth request for a nipple. Sean offered him the bottle.

Axel (perhaps in homage to the grouchy ladybug) screamed at the bottle and pushed it away as violently as you can push something when you weigh less than a case of beer. This is the normal reaction to something that you've asked for - screaming and pushing. I like to do that after I order in restaurants - "Salmon? You think I ordered the salmon? Well you can take that perfectly cooked salmon and stuff it! And don't even think of offering me that molten chocolate cake for dessert!"

So, Sean put Axel down in his crib for a few minutes, because Axel had made it very clear that he didn't want anything that his parents could provide. Axel wailed. After a few minutes, Axel hadn't fallen asleep, so Sean went back in and found that Axel had, in his rage, taken off his pants. There he was, sitting up in his crib on top of his grandma-made sock monkey quilt, pantsless. After reporting to me that our son got so angry he took off his drawers, and trying to stifle his laughter, Sean went in and re-dressed Axel, offered him a little more milk, and Axel went off to dreamland.

In addition to angry pants and sock removal (maybe because his legs and feet get hot when he's mad? or because his pants are a symbol of the man holding him down and requiring that he wear clothes? Perhaps it's early rebellion against the dress code he'll encounter in middle school?), Axel has two other ways of showing his anger: an angry dinosaur shriek triggered when he can't have something sharp and pointy and likely to strangle him, and exertion farts. When he's particularly mad, he flings back his body, screams, and lets out some loud gas. This makes it hard to take his anger seriously. He's so mad that he toots. I know I shouldn't laugh, but it's hard to keep a straight face at a pantsless, farting kid who lets out high-pitched velociraptor sounds audible to dogs a few states over, all because I won't let him wrap a jump rope around his neck.

(Picture taken just before a scream at the horror of having to go out to breakfast.)

So, how about you? What funny things do your children do when angry?

Sleepless in Denver

knockedup — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:54:00 GMT

I know I should be thanking the magically delicious shooting stars and purple horseshoes that Axel's sleeping a solid ten hours each night. And I'm grateful. It's just that I'd consider animal sacrifice (just a little one, like a goldfish) if it would guarantee that he'd sleep in a little longer, until the sun is higher in the sky than the moon, even until 6:00 or 6:30 am.

Most mornings, I'm on solo baby duty. My man works 24 hour shifts which, with driving time and the fact that he gets in early and leaves late, mean that he's gone 26+ hours. So, if he's working, he leaves the house by 5:45. If he's coming home from work, he gets back at 7:45. Thus I'm trying to walk the dog and dress myself and dress the baby and feed the baby and possibly run a couple miles before work and make sure my sweater doesn't have boogers on it and get the bottles and diapers and my work crap in the car and a squirming baby in his car seat and, well, you get the picture. It's just a little bit chaotic. There's a lot of tripping over the cat and wearing of socks that don't match.

Almost every morning between 5 and 5:15, Axel makes his first peep, and I beg him (silently, from the other room) to just sleep in a little longer, so that I can sleep a little more and/or shower in peace. And every morning, Axel decides that 5:30 is the perfect time to get up and at 'em, and get the proverbial worm and all that. He's got important things to do. He can't just lounge around in bed all day. Hey, lazybones mama, he calls, get moving! There are enough worms to go around, I want to tell him, and you can still dig up a whole mess of them if you just give me fifteen more minutes.

Further complicating things: my old strategies no longer work. It seems I've got to pull a new baby distraction technique out of the hat every month. Now that Axel hates the exersaucer because baby, he was born to move, I can't stick him in there to bounce while I'm in the shower. This morning, I shut us both in the bathroom and hopped in the shower, and Axel discovered the toilet paper roll, a momentus occasion in any child's life, and ripped off sheets and then amused himself by trying to open the lid on the toilet. He ignored the colorful and strategically placed toys on the floor. The bathroom was a mess, my hair was wet, I had mascara on one set of my blonde eyelashes, and then a wave of ravenous hunger overtook Axel and forced him to do this weird bouncing from his butt to half standing thing that would be impressive if he wasn't also kind of being a butthead. An adorable butthead with a piece of (clean) toilet paper stuck to his upper lip.

I'm thinking maybe if I pulled an actual rabbit out my hat, especially a talking rabbit with bells on its toes, I'd be able to take a four minute shower and still have eight minutes to get dressed before Axel gets bored with the rabbit and tries to pull the phone book off the shelf and rip up all the listings of plumbers - which I let him to do because there seems to be seven competing phone book companies in our area, each of which delivers a new edition to us every month which we don't use because that's what the internet is for.

Let me pause here and say that all this morning chaos makes me even more impressed by single parents. Sure, I'm alone lots of days of the month, but not every day. Someone else is responsible for the compost bin and mowing the lawn (really, he does it, despite what it looks like in the picture above) and does half the grocery shopping (three cheers for my husband!). Just the thought of really doing it all alone overwhelms me. You guys are amazing. Big applause, all around.

I've tried shifting Axel's bedtime up a little and back a little. Still, his internal alarm goes off by 5:30. Regardless of whether he guzzles six ounces of milk or two before bed, he gets up before the sun. Dog barks have no influence on his sleeping or waking. He's just a morning baby. I'm mostly a morning person myself, but I'd like my morning to start at 5:45 and his to start at 6, so I have a few minutes to get some things done before the bright-eyed and diaper-tailed hyper-speed crawler joins me. Anything before 5:45 should still be dreamland for me and especially for a growing baby.

He did sleep until 6:30 on Monday. I got really, really excited, and then he woke up at 5:15 yesterday and at 5:20 today and dashed my hopefullness. He was coming down with a cold, and somehow I don't think that encouraging illness is the solution.

Unless any of you out there have some tried and true ways to get babies to sleep in, short of drugging them, I think I'm just going to have to get up earlier if I want to reduce the chaos. My alarm is going to be set for 5 am. No more late night TV for me, or drinks after happy hour, or crazy 10:00 pm dance parties in the living room. Not that I did any of those things before - I've been doing laundry and prepping things for daycare and doing dishes and catching up on work emails and trying to find a winter coat for Axel on Ebay. I'll just have to resign myself to sleeping less and drinking more lattes, and stop holding out hope that I'll be well-rested anytime in the next eighteen years.

The Great Sleep Saga, Chapter 10

knockedup — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:19:00 GMT

Yup, it's more on sleep again. Babies are supposed to be sleeping 14 - 15 hours at seven months between naps and nightime - or at least that's what I remember reading somewhere, but I can't seem to find the source. I know for sure it's a lot and, since it takes up more than half of Axel's day and not nearly enough of mine, it's frequent blog fodder. I'm no sleep expert, just another momma trying to make her fumbly, bumbly way through the bleary-eyed wee hours of the morning.

We've had some sleep successes. Axel can now fall asleep on his own most nights. I wouldn't have believed it was possible three months ago. I thought I'd be rocking the child and singing My Favorite Things until he grew armpit hair and I had the unsquelchable urge to rip the whiskers off of every kitten I saw and gorge on schnitzel with noodles. Gradually, the sleep situation has gotten better, and you needn't worry about any poor kitten's whiskers or my pork consumption.

Here's a list of things that have contributed to our bedtime success:

1. We stick to the bedtime routine like a lemon cupcake to vanilla buttercream frosting. Nothing will interfere with the bedtime routine - unless it is baby-initiated or a natural disaster.

2. Our nightly routine: some mushy solids at about 6, playtime, bathtime at 6:45, baby massage/baby wrestling and yelling about the ignominy of diapers at 7:00, board book reading and page nibbling at 7:10, nursing at 7:25, and put the boy in his crib (with the humidifier on for white noise and moisture in the high alpine desert of Denver) at 7:45. This schedule shifts forward or backward a bit depending on when Axel woke up from his last nap, if my husband is on shift and I'm alone and exhausted, or if Axel seems ready for bedtime earlier. By the time we get to the books, Axel knows what's coming (sleep) and he's ready for it. I used to rock him and tunelessly sing from my vast repertoire of Beach Boys and Buddy Holly songs after 7:45 because he needed it, but I gradually cut back on the rocking and eventually got to a place where I could just put him down.

3. I put the boy down on his side and he promptly rolls to his belly. A few months ago he started choosing to sleep on his stomach, and now we've found that putting him down on his back, he gets all riled up and ready to rumble - and that requires more intervention, and no one wants that. When he's put down on his side, he looks around, rolls on to his stomach, wiggles a little, and then passes out.

4. We do not immediately intervene with all fussing. If it's been extended and is passionate (for us, that means 2 - 10 minutes and stronger than a few half-hearted whimpers), we'll go in and provide some love. At about five and a half months or six months, I discovered (in a moment of frustration and exhaustion, after putting him down after the bedtime routine and a little rocking because he wasn't asleep yet, I was seasick with all the damn rocking, and I really wanted to sit down and eat already) that he would briefly squawk and then babble to himself a bit before suddenly - almost too quickly, so abruptly that I thought maybe he'd choked on his own thumb and had to go check on him - going silent and falling asleep. He's figured out how to trigger his own awake time on/off switch - it's not a gradual dimmer, it's a switch with just two settings. Also, after six months, we decided that, if he did wake up before midnight, he would first be given a chance to sooth himself back to sleep; if that didn't work after after a little bit, my husband would go in - but there would be no nursing before 12:01 am. He's still nursing once per night, but no longer does he nurse each time he wakes up. I wanted to reinforce the links between other ways of going to sleep.

5. Axel is now in his own room. He has been for about two months now, and it was time for both of us to have a little more space. That means I don't jump immediately at his every whimper, and I have at least a few minutes of semi-coherent mushy night thinking on the walk from my room to his room to remind myself to wait at his door and see if he really needs me or if he's just fussing about and setling himself back down to sleep. He also doesn't hear us move, and he doesn't smell me right next to him and think, "Mmmmm, mmmmmilk."

So, our combination for moderate sleep success: own room, bedtime routine, white noise, a little bit of fussing, clinging to every small success, and a whole lot of luck and fairy dust. Maybe the solid foods started in the last month have helped fill up his belly, maybe he thinks all those bears and hippos in the Boyton books have the right idea about bedtime, maybe he's just tiring himself out more with all his activity. I've also got a suspicion that the introduction to sometimes falling asleep on his own that occured during his three days a week at daycare helped with sleeping at home.

All that said, he still gets up once a night between one and three to eat, and every so often more than that. Once per night seems very reasonable to me, and I'm thankful it's just once, given that he used to wake up so often I stopped counting. He also does this evil 5 am waking for the day thing from time to time. I have no idea what to do about this except stare up at my ceiling, listen to him talking to himself, and wish that he would sleep longer.

Naptime is a whole different story. Axel's got a morning nap (starting at 8 - 9, depending on when he wakes up in the morning), and an afternoon nap (starting at 12:30 - 1:30, depending on when the last nap ended). Once in awhile he throws in a third late afternoon nap. When it's naptime and he's getting tired, I scoop him up and get him ready for bed, and then try to get him to sleep by a variety of strategies. It often becomes a back and forth battle with Axel almost falling asleep then waking himself up to yell and remind me that he's tired and he wants to sleep. His morning nap is pretty short - rarely over thirty minutes - and it's often harder to get him to go down for the morning nap than the afternoon nap. My theory is that he will be better off when he's down to just the afternoon nap, since that one always lasts longer, sometimes as much as two hours, and is a smoother transition for Axel. My second theory is that I'll keep on wishing as hard as I can that it will get better, and maybe the nightime sleep fairy that's helped us out with rain down her blessings on naptime. My third theory is that the gradual trial and error that seems to have helped with the bedtime routine will eventually help us more with naptime. Some things haven't changed: I've still got enough rotating sleep theories for a dozen dissertations.

We're making progress, one night at a time.

The Five Minute Sleep Solution

knockedup — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:05:00 GMT

The sleep solution - at least the current solution - is stomach sleeping. Sleeping face down, with his arms splayed out and face smushed against the mattress, is apparently Axel's preferred sleep position. Maybe for months he's been longing to be belly-down at night, and was thwarted by our committment to the anti-SIDS back to sleep approach. I don't blame him - I like to sleep on my stomach, too, especially now that I'm not carrying six pounds of baby and twenty plus pounds of amniotic fluid and pudge in my belly. Because I'm the sort to follow the doctor's recommendations precisely, especially when they have anything to do with death, we still put him to sleep on his back - it's just that he's figured out that he can immediately roll over, wiggle around for five minutes, and burrow down into his red crib sheet before passing out. Though I've twisted his chin to the side when his nose is smashed down, I'm not so paranoid that I roll Axel back over to his back again and again. If I started that, I'd be doing nothing but baby rolling all night long. If he's able to do his rolly-poly nightly settling routine, he's also able to roll back, should he need to.

Let me back up and explain our other sleep-promoting steps over the past few weeks. First, we moved Axel in to his own room. I thought he would have moved from his spot in the Pack N Play next to our bed to his bedroom sooner, but his room wasn't quite finished. See, we were insane enough to decide to renovate our kitchen, add on another bedroom and bathroom, and reconfigure the office (now nursery) starting when I was just over five months pregnant with Axel. Things didn't go as planned, as they tend to when construction or children are involved, and, after the delays of our pokey, half-competent contractor, Sean's just now finishing up the trim on the doors, windows, and baseboards. The move in to Axel's room went pretty smoothly and didn't, as I worried that it would, backfire and cause even more night wakings and restlessness. He settled right in, happily grabbing at the yellow wall during diaper changes and spitting up on the red and gray carpet tiles.

Axel's also been partaking of the sticky pasty deliciousness known as rice cereal mixed with breast milk. Except when he's sick, he loves it - grabbing for the spoon with two hands and making his monkey face of excitement at it. It reminds me making an elaborate paper mache earth for my 6th grade geography class. Get out some newspaper strips and a balloon and we could make our own solar system with the leftovers. I don't think this has had much of an affect on his sleep, but he seems to like it, and so we're going to keep on offering him bland mush.

We're also fiercely protective of the bedtime routine. We rushed home from a slow restaurant, changing our dine-in order to to-go, to get home in time to start the rice cereal, bath, baby massage, books, then bed routine. With all of this, and allowing a bit of nighttime fussing - never more than ten minutes, because I am thin-skinned and weak - Axel's down to waking up just once per night.

Now, with his cold still in such force that he coughed so hard he made himself throw up, our sleeping through the night plan of attack is on hold. We've withdrawn the sleep battling troops for some R & R, since we've all been hit by the same late season cold, cough, and aches. Waking up once per night isn't really so bad, though, especially when compared to the four plus wakings we had before. The most annoying sleep situation right now is that he's woken up at 5 am the past few mornings, and only been willing to fall asleep and stay asleep until 6 in my husband's arms. The kid's sick, so I can see how sleeping cuddled up against a warm body would be comforting in the early morning. I'm hoping the early morning waking when not yet ready to wake will pass when the cold does.

I'm obsessed with sleep - who's sleeping, how long, why, why not. I'm a sleep-information addict, but all that information's just filling in for the real thing: my sleep craving will only be satisfied by the elusive, blissful full night's rest.

Axel's Rules of Sleep

knockedup — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:01:00 GMT

1. Sleep cannot be commanded.

It is futile to attempt to command a baby to sleep. That's why sleep deprivation, rather than forcing someone to sleep for days, is an instrument of torture. Perhaps we can all be wooed a bit into sleep and happiness by the right environments, but there's only so much a warm bath and a off-tune Otis Redding tune can do for my baby. Once I've wooed Axel to the edge of sleep, only he can jump into- and stay in - that state. I keep forgetting this rule and having to re-learn it because, in the bleary-eyed exhaustion of the night, telling a baby that he has to go to sleep and not sleeping is not an option is pretty easy to fall back on.

2. Never turn on the television while attempting to sleep train your baby. Especially not the news.

One night, while home alone with Axel, he woke up about 15 minutes after falling asleep. I decided to let him fuss for about five minutes, as he'd cried for a few minutes, then fallen asleep, the last time I tried it (see rule nine). This time, though, he didn't wind down (see 10). So, I went in, rocked him for a bit, and we tried again. I went into the living room and flipped on the TV. At that moment, the sparkly-eyed newscaster - who looked like she got at least six hours of sleep in a row every night and a luxurious nap on top - chattered on about a tiny baby who'd just died, and was then left on the doorstep of a local hospital. The baby wore a pink sleeper and white socks. I heard one of Axel's forlorn sobs over the news, and I couldn't let him cry after hearing that story. The next night, Sean went to the hospital, so I'm sure it will take me awhile to work back up to even a five-minute fuss tolerance.

3. Rice cereal does not lead to longer stretches of sleep.

I said I wasn't going to try it. Well, I did. My totally unscientific study of a handful of parents I know found that some thought it worked and some didn't. Our pediatrician said it doesn't usually, but every once in awhile it seems to help. I latched on to the sliver of possibility that it would help, and mixed up a batch of it with breast milk and fed it to Axel. After almost a week of rice cereal, we have only found that Axel thinks red spoons belong inside of his mouth at all times, and, even if babies chow it down, rice cereal tastes like crap. I made the mistake of licking it off my finger and almost threw up on the spot.

4. A baby's ability to fall asleep on his/her own, to fall asleep easily, or to fall asleep under various conditions, does not necessarily mean he/she will stay asleep for any longer

In the last six weeks, Axel's become much better at falling asleep at night. Sean no longer has to bounce on the exercise ball with him for a half an hour, begging him to drop off. I don't waltz around the bedroom singing Petula Clark tunes over and over again for almost an hour. Axel has his bath, gets lotioned-up, punches the pages of a few board books, and then nurses or is rocked a little by his father. Then, the kid is out. The ease with which he now falls asleep, though, seems to have no relationship with the length of time he stays asleep. There was a time when Axel fell asleep at 7:30 or 8 pm and only woke up once before getting up for the day at 6:30 or 7. That blessed period seems to have been no more than a cruel joke he played on us to show what a relatively good night's sleep feels like. While he's gotten a little better from the sleep trainwreck of three weeks ago - meaning that I now count the number of times he wakes up, whereas for a bit there I just stopped writing it all down in his journal because that made the horror of it all too concrete - he's still up an average of three times a night.

5. Babies who do not sleep are not always cranky. Their parents, on the other hand, can be snarky bastards.

Axel's a happy kid, whether he's napped that day for two thirty-minute bouts or for a total of three hours. He can be easily convinced to smile at anyone. He even smiles at inanimate objects - like his stuffed giraffe - from time to time. I, however, have been reduced to flipping off people who drive in the bike lane while I'm running, pushing Axel in his stroller. Yes, I know that flipping drivers off is juvenile and not such a great habit to display in front of my infant son. But I'm tired and sometimes that makes me mean. Actually, there's a good chance I might have done that even on eight hours of sleep. It's a bike lane, not a special car lane with thick white lines painted on either side of it.

6. The phrase, "Let sleeping dogs lie," is stupid.

Dogs? Really? Are there lots of dogs with insomnia out there? Should we start wrapping little Ambien pills in bacon and feeding it to them? Who even thought that phrase up? Where's the baby Ambien?

7. Rescue Remedy may work for someone, somewhere, but not Axel.

Rescue Remedy is an herbal flower thing recommended by our doctor. You can put it in the bath or take it orally. Axel twists up his mouth in disgust when I try to put a few drops underneath his toungue. Drops of it in the bath seem to help me calm down, but Axel is impervious to its powers.

8. I am really, really irrational at 3 am. And 4:30 am. And 5. And, now, at any time after 8 pm and before 8 am.

That's when the people who are trying to raise money for that police-related league for which donations are not tax deductible should call me, because I'll probably say anything to get them off the phone. Actually, if those people can come over and make my baby sleep for ten hours straight, I might just sign over my retirement fund to them.

9. What worked before may not work again. But it might. Then again, it might not.

One night, I decided to let Axel fuss for a few minutes and see what happened. After about five minutes, he started quieting down. His cries turned to sporadic, calm squeaks, and then silence. That worked again another night. And then, it stopped working. Maybe it's because he's going through early teething, or he has a cold, or he's lonely or he had a baby nightmare about whatever horrible things it is that haunt babies - you know, like a world in which they try to put things in their mouth and everything bounces off the edge of their lips as though their mouths are shielded by a forcefield, maybe. I'm sure there's some reason that the things that work stop working, it's just I'm too damn tired to figure it out.

10. Most importantly, there are no rules.

Everyone's got a sleep strategy or a sleep theory. There's no guarantee that what worked for your kid is going to work for any other kid. Regular naps during the day supposedly help sleep at night, as do regular bedtimes. Rice cereal, stress, weather changes, cosleeping, not cosleeping, being too hot or too cold, a full moon, no moon, Big Foot....Maybe some of those have helped Axel, and his sleep would be even more crappy without those things, but they haven't helped to the extent that I'd like them to.

My newest theory: sleep at night makes babies sleep at night. So, the more rest a baby has on one night, the more likely he'll rest the next night. Lack of sleep at night leads to more lack of sleep at night. How to break the cycle? I don't know. My other theory: Axel needs to get tanked up more during the day. He's a very particular eater and, often, doesn't take more than 2 - 3 ounces from a bottle feeding at daycare or from his father or grandparents. Sometimes he just nurses for a few minutes with me, and other times he does a big marathon session. Eating, however, is like sleep - you can create opportunities for eating, but you can't force a baby to gulp more milk down.

Axel's the anti-sleep Superman and we've yet to find the Kryptonite that will break him. But we will. Oh yes, we will. And then we'll capture El Chupacabra and go on the road, showing off our goat-eating vampire and selling our sleep solutions to the masses.

Sleep Wooing

knockedup — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 18:17:00 GMT

Sean and I have adopted a take-no-prisoners approach to Axel's capricious sleep/no sleep days and nights. We are presenting a united front. It's Mama and Daddy against the cranky, sleep baby who needs, but doesn't want, sleep.

We're fighting for the enemy's heart and mind, as they say, so the weapons in our arsenal must be of the more subtle kind. You can't threaten a baby to sleep, or poke him with needles until he gives in and snoozes. Believe me, I've tried - not the needles, though lord knows that, in moments that were not my best, filled with the sort of desperation that fuels the sales of sleep solution books, I can't say that I wouldn't have tried a little pin pricking if a self-appointed expert told me that jabbing a baby with needles is a sure bet for making him sleep through the night - but the commands.

"Go to sleep now," I've said, playing the mommy dictator of the land of slumber. "You have to sleep. Not sleeping is not an option. You better sleep or you'll regret it tomorrow." Axel knows these are empty threats. I'm the one who's going to regret it the next day if he doesn't sleep. And what am I going to do if he doesn't? Punish him by making him stay awake longer? You can't punish a four month old. Four month olds don't misbehave - I mean, sometimes Axel sticks his thumb in his nose when he's going for his mouth. Clearly we do not have a criminal mastermind on our hands. We can't lock him up and bully him in to dreamland. Sleep cannot be forced.

War is too strong of a word for what we're doing, even though it sure feels like a battle to me at 3 am. It's more like sleep wooing. Axel was, after all, the size of a pea a year ago. He's grown 24 inches in a year. Teenagers turn into huge jerks when they're only sprouting up four inches in a year. It makes sense to me that such rapid development would make some babies (including our mostly sweet boy) a little nutty, and I'm fine babying my boy since he is, after all, just a baby. Given his transformation from a legume to a wee person, the strategy that seems best for us is to take a gradual (but steady) approach to encouraging longer naps and larger chunks of sleep at night, easing him along the developmental path. My goal is just to get him back to the very manageable once-per-night feeding.

Since it's futile to even attempt to command our baby to sleep, our approach is to butter him up and wear him down. We're seducing him with lullabies and rocking. We're chipping away at his sleep-refusing willpower by exposing him to sunlight early in the day, getting outside a few times, and engaging in lots of active play. We're encouraging three regular daily naps even if it sometimes takes twenty minutes of rocking and patting and patiently waiting out the fussies to get him to stay down, or if he only wants to nap in the sling. I made Sean hang bath towels over the drapes in an effort to further darken the room, and we're faithfully running the humidifier for white noise. We're sticking with our nightly Four B routine - bath, baby massage, books, breastfeeding - to ease him into sleep. I've also finally figured out how to nurse lying down, so I can rest while the boy eats and feel less like a groggy zombie the next day (yeah, I know - it seems pretty straightforward but I still couldn't make it work until recently). We've already seen some benefits, though I'm honestly not sure if it's just a fluke or if it's because of our sleep strategies. Axel was back to waking up just once to eat on Friday night, though on Saturday he was up twice. Twice is still a huge improvement on some of the nights we've had lately. I'll take any progress we can get, even if it sometimes feels like it's at a tranquilized turtle's pace.

And, if all else fails, we'll just wait it out. Maybe he's teething - he has been drenching his shirts with drool and gnawing on his knuckles. Maybe it's a growth spurt. We're patient. It's probably just a phase - even if, in the wee hours of the morning, it feels like a long one.

Let the great sleep ~~battle~~ wooing of 2008 begin!