Babies need sleep-mommies need sleep

This is my longest post to date! I've been clicking away on my computer on and off all day as a new thought comes to me. I feel like I'm forgetting so much.

I know this is long and so full of information. Most people will find it completely boring.

There were a few moms who posted in detail their experience with sleep training and I couldn't get enough. This post is for those kind of moms/moms to be =)

These are the things that worked for us.
Hope it helps someone.

 

I don't do well when I'm tired...or hungry. I can be a little testy...or downright mean.
Anyway, enough about me.

I was really concerned about the whole sleep thing when it came to having a baby. I was worried that I would get the obnoxious sleep deprivation everyone talks about. You know, the pesky little thing that causes you to hate your husband just because he walked in the room wearing red instead of blue?
Or is that just me?
Poor guy, he can do nothing right when I'm tired (or hungry)

I decided I was going to read anything and everything about getting a baby to sleep, aka, sleep training.
I googled, I asked mommies thousands of questions, I read blogs (so-many-blogs!) I was a crazy person when it came to this subject.

I think most of my panic came from the fact that I've never had trouble sleeping. I've always been blessed with the ability to fall asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and stay asleep until the alarm woke me up in the morning. I find this to be one of my better qualities.

Don't hate me because I'm a good sleeper.

Once I realized this little being was going to mess all of that up, I panicked.
However, now that I've had my share of sleepless nights (because let me tell you, it IS inevitable) I'm not so scared of it. Its not so bad...and the hubs is still alive.

Anyone know how to rotate pictures, cause I cant figure it out!! 

 

First, I did the whole "Baby Wise" schedule thing. I highly recommend this, however, I've found that its not necessary for getting your baby to sleep through the night. It certainly helps, because when your baby is on an eating/sleep schedule, you can start cutting out feedings in the middle of the night without worrying that your baby is starving. If you don't have them on a schedule, I would imagine its hard to know whether your baby woke up in the middle of the night crying cause he's hungry, or just because that's what babies do. In all my research I read a lot (more than I wanted to) about sleep cycles (incredibly boring) and REM sleep and all that stuff. None of it really stuck, but one thing I did hang on to was that babies wake up constantly through the night until they are closer to 4 even 6 months. In the first couple of months their sleep cycle changes every 45 minutes, so they wake up every 45 minutes to an hour, even during naps. (I'm kind of pulling this from memory, so I may be off a little on how old they are when this all changes)

So when a baby wakes up and cries, it doesn't always mean its hungry, so feeding him every time he cries in the middle of the night, just creates a habit. One that is hard to break as they get older (from what I understand) So a schedule helps you know that your baby is not hungry, but just waking up (per his sleep cycle) and needs to learn how to fall back to sleep on his own. (unless its a growth spurt, then the baby is hungry all the time and needs to be fed! The good thing is, you kind of have a guide to when the growth spurts will hit. The growth spurts will be between one and three weeks; and another between six and eight weeks. After that, you can expect more at three months, six months, and nine months....so much to learn!!!)

This brings me to the second thing that, for me, was key to this whole sleep training thing. This is actually a bit controversial in some circles, but I'm an old fashioned girl who believes in disciplining your children, letting them eat dirt, etc., so I was committed to this method. You have to be 100% committed to this, or it wont work, and you will end up feeling completely miserable. It may take longer, but there are other ways, so find what works for you! We will be doing this for all of our kids... Are you curious yet? I just realized I have this long introduction and haven't actually told you what I'm talking about!

Cry It Out.

Some people get chills just from hearing the term, but I get happy goosebumps! Not because I enjoy hearing my baby cry.
 Come on people! I'm not heartless!
Knowing I can comfort my sons little heart by picking him up for a few minutes creates a battle in my head, but I needed to keep the goal in mind, and I decided that comforting him in that moment isn't something he needed, it was something he wanted. And oh what a wonderful feeling to know he wants my hugs. But, for me, more importantly, he needs to learn how to sleep. For his development, health...and my sanity.
I want to give my son the gift of sleep...good sleep. So, I let him cry knowing its for his own good in the long run. There will be lots and lots of hugs during other parts of our day.

Its my job to teach him everything he needs to know about life (except "the talk", that's his dads job. Good luck babe!) This includes teaching him how to sleep...actually, what we're doing is teaching him how to fall back to sleep. Babies know how to sleep, they just don't know how to fall back to sleep without a little help.
 Crying it out has helped my little guy learn how to soothe himself back to sleep.
Those are powerful words.

I know there are other ways to teach a baby to do this, but from what I've read, this is the most affective way, and the fastest. Some moms will wait until they are so completely sleep deprived that they are ready to walk off a tall building, and that's ok. (not the walking off a tall building part)
Do it when you're ready. Completely, 100% ready.
We started B when he was about 2 months old, so with him being so young, we did a more gradual version. I bought the book "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems" by Dr. Ferber, the "cry it out doctor".
Poor guy, I'm guessing mothers from all over had a picture of his face hanging in their game room as a dart board. Apparently he rewrote his book within the last few years and was a little less harsh. Makes me curious about the first version of the book....

Hmmmm.....

 

Anyway, I loved it and I loved the gradual version. I think starting when B was so young made it easier. Its never too late, but as they get older, they start to have a preference. What they like, what they don't like, and their will is stronger...meaning they can cry for a lot longer! 

When we would put him down for the night, or a nap, we would let him cry for 3 minutes to start with. Then, we would go in, rub his little back, shush him, basically just letting him know we were there and hadn't deserted him, and also reassuring ourselves that he was, in fact, ok. And we weren't supposed to stay in longer than 2 minutes. What we didn't know until we read the book, was that the purpose of going in every few minutes wasn't to stop them from crying. If they stop because you're in there, that's ok, but if they are still crying when you leave, that's ok. Then, you wait 5 minutes, go in, shush them, rub their back, leave. Then 8 minutes, then 12, then 15. If they are still crying after the 15 minute "session" you just go in every 15 minutes after that until they eventually fall asleep. In the beginning we would let him cry it out up to the 15 minute session, then give him his pacifier to help a little. Eventually, as he got better at falling asleep, we started to cut the pacifier out too.
With this more gradual version, it took a couple of weeks for it to work, but it was so worth it. Obviously you cant always do this for naps, because after that much time, their nap will be over. More about naps later.
One of THE MOST important things we learned, which I mentioned earlier, was that we never picked him up. Again, unless there is something wrong, but that goes without saying...I would hope. Once they learn that you will come pick them up when they cry, they will use that to their advantage.

Smart little suckers.

Naps are another beast altogether. Apparently, babies have a "night brain" and a "day brain"...whatever that means. I try and tell my husband that I have the equivalent of two brains all the time.

 

This probably should have been what I started this post with.
Something that helped a lot, was establishing day sleep (naps) from night sleep. You can start this as soon as you bring baby home from the hospital. We had to help B determine day from night. Baby Wise helped with this in that you wake them up from naps during the day. Its hard to do, and feels wrong, but with Brody, he was starting his "night sleep" around 3 in the afternoon, and would sleep for almost 5 straight hours, so we knew he could sleep a while at that point (I think he was 1 month), but he was doing it at the wrong time, so we started waking him up early from that nap to keep him on his feeding schedule (see Baby Wise).

Also, very important, at the night feedings, you don't want to cause any stimulation. Brand new babies are VERY easily stimulated, so no talking to them, not even eye contact when you feed them in the middle of the night. (wait until they start smiling. You'll be changing their diaper, getting ready to put them back in the crib, and out of the corner of your eye you see a huge grin on their face. A.D.O.R.A.B.L.E. In my head I'm chanting "don't make eye contact, don't make eye contact...but he's SO FRIGGIN CUTE!!")
So I feed him, change him if necessary, try (and fail) to avoid eye contact, then put him right back to bed (keep lights very dim during this whole process)

For day feedings and naps, all kinds of normal noise is good. Even a lightly lit room and some music, or white noise while they sleep. Vacuum, wash your dishes. You'll be glad you got your baby use to sleeping through some noise. I couldn't tiptoe all day while he napped.
 But at night, limited noise and a dark room, or a nightlight.

Once Brody was on a schedule, we no longer had to be so crazy about this whole routine. Now he is tired at 7:30pm and even if we make noise or talk to him while he's drinking his bottle before bed, he'll still go to sleep.

 Once he was on a schedule, the naps seemed to fall into place because we could put him down and he knew we weren't going to come back in and pick him up, so he would eventually go to sleep. Before 3 months, it was more important to me that he got a nap, because as weird as it sounds, sleep breeds sleep. So I would sometimes hold him for over an hour (not that I'm complaining) so he could get a good chunk of sleep. Eventually he got better and better at sleeping and putting himself back to sleep that I didn't need to hold him in order to get a good nap out of him.
Now he's a great napper (knock on wood) and I'm glad I had those days where I held him for hours.

I tried to keep things balanced. Yes, these are great "rules" to follow for getting my little guy to sleep through the night, but I also know they grow up fast, so if I wanted to break the rules and hold him when I "wasn't supposed to", I did it! And I'm glad I did.


Side note: Swaddling was huge, for naps and for nighttime. My mom use to sneak in and unswaddle him because she felt bad for him. We realized half an hour later, because he woke up. He slept so much better and longer when he was swaddled. We finally stopped when he started rolling over to his tummy. Arms come in handy at that point. The first night unswaddled was a little rough, but then he got use to his limbs and was back to sleeping through the night.

This swaddle blanket was a life saver...until he learned how to get out of it.

Found him like this one morning.

 

Its supposed to look like this

Haha!!

Also, knowing when baby is tired and winding down before naps and nighttime was important. He never did well going straight from playing with me to the crib. Five or ten minutes of quiet, sitting with mom, reading a book and sucking on his pacifier was our wind down time before any kind of sleep.
Once I learned when B was tired, but not overtired, the cry it out was cut back quite a bit. There is a ridiculously small window of time to get baby down before he's overtired. Once they're over tired, they fight sleep and when they do fall asleep, they don't seem to sleep as well or as long. So, I read somewhere that by the 3rd yawn, start to wind down and within 5 minutes put baby down for their nap. Sounds ridiculously specific, right? But it worked!
Once I found B's window, it made putting him down for naps SO much easier.
It could take some time to figure out you babies window, but once you find it, its like magic =)


Well, there it is.
These are the things that worked for us.
I believe that every baby is different, and with each baby there will be a different level of difficulty, but I do believe these methods could work for a lot of babies.
However, I know that we are so blessed with B. He has his dads temperament, so he's very easy going and laid back. Our next kid may put all of my knew found knowledge to the test (he/she might be more like me!)

 

 

Happy sleeps everyone!