Knocked Up : sleep wooing

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!