How we did it: Infant Sleep Routines

So I came across this post in my drafts that I wrote more than six years ago, before there was even a thought of baby 4.  I thought it was worth publishing, so I spent my usual Wednesday blogging time making slight tweaks and getting it ready.  Enjoy a trip into my six-years-ago brain and learn some of my thoughts on sleep and sleep deprivation with babies!  Back to present-day updates soon!

I've been wanting for a while to write down a few parenting processes that I'd like to remember, should another baby ever come along for us. You know, things like sleep training, weaning, solid foods, potty training etc. My memory of these types of things is fading quickly, so I feel an urgency to write things down so I can remember "how we did it" and what worked for our family... perhaps so I can even share that knowledge when my own kids have babies someday, if it's still relevant. Thus begins my "how we did it" series.

Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert on baby sleep, and I'm not posting this to pretend that I am.  As all of us parents know, no one strategy works for all families and all babies.  Just tellin' y'all what we did.

So... here is the basic plan that we used for establishing infant sleep routines. There were tweaks here and there for individual girls' personalities, but I'll give you the overall big picture.

Step #1: Go to bed early

When we brought all three babies home from the hospital, I always went into self preservation mode (for the first month anyway) and insisted on going to bed at 8 PM, and taking baby with me. We did this for about 4-6 weeks after baby was born. When I was waking in the night with a newborn I was always ready to sleep by that time, and if my sleep was going to be interrupted, at least I could lengthen the amount of time that I was in bed and sort of make up for those lost middle-of-the-night hours. This unfortunately meant that I left Daddy or Grandma with the responsibility of things like cleaning up supper and putting older siblings to bed (although usually all older siblings were in bed by 7:30 ish anyway).

Yes, they were totally okay with this and even encouraged me to retire early.  I have the best husband and Momma in the world.  I try not to take this for granted!!

Baby wasn't always asleep and settled by 8.  If baby was fussy I would swaddle or nurse laying down or sometimes rock in the rocker and doze at the same time. The main idea was that the room was completely dark and free of other people, and that happened at a consistent time each night. A few times when C was little M would work on his laptop on the other side of the bed while I was settling her, but that was the extent of any noise or light in the room.

This also meant that M and I missed out on any post-kid-bedtime alone time for those four weeks or so. It was tough, and we had that ships-passing-in-the-night feeling, but it was only for a few weeks, and a necessary evil I think. I was able to get the rest I needed so I wasn't a weeping puddle of goo during the day and was able to handle my life. It also began to establish and rhythm and routine for baby's sleeping cycles, which eventually led to more structured sleep patterns.

Step #2: Co-sleep for the first month, then transition gradually to baby's own bed

Normally having kiddos in our bed is a habit that M and I discourage, gently returning them to their own beds at night when they wake up, even if it takes a little extra time and effort. However... in the first month of baby's life we broke this rule and kept baby in the bed right between us. When baby is nursing more than 3-4 times a night it maximized sleep for me to be able to just roll over and do a feeding right there. Diaper changes happened in the bed too; I just kept a little waterproof pad under baby to help keep things from getting too messy.

{Disclaimer: co-sleeping with a newborn is generally frowned upon from a safety standpoint by pretty much any health expert you ask.  So I can't wholeheartedly recommend it, and just advise any parents to use their best judgement.  For us it worked four times, and we never had any safety issues or accidents.  Also, humans have been co-sleeping with their babies for many thousands of years.  But again, make your own decision based on current safety recommendations.}

As soon as it felt like the co-sleeping was hindering sleep more than it helped, we started to transition baby into her own bed. Usually this happened as soon as baby was pretty consistently sleeping one long stretch at night (3-4 hours). We made the transition slowly... at first baby's bed was a bassinet or pack n play right next to our bed, then it was in a far corner of our room, and finally in a separate room.  The time at which we made these changes depended on the baby and how long she was sleeping, and also on what other beds we had available in the house. (C stayed in our room the longest, because at the time we only had two bedrooms and there were already two girls in the other bedroom!)  It was also around this time that I started allowing baby to fuss for 1-2 minutes before jumping right up to feed her.  Sometimes she would go back to sleep on her own.

After completing both steps 1 and 2, all of my babies were regularly sleeping a 6-8 hour stretch at night by the time they were 4-6 weeks old. 

I don't know if these methods were what caused the good sleeping, or if we just lucked out... and really, it's only now that I'm looking back that I can see any kind of consistency in what we did from kid to kid.  In the moment, we were just going with whatever worked best-- it's not like we came into this baby thing with a master plan or anything.  There was plenty of flying by the seat of our pants, and it just kind of happened that the same sort of things worked for all three girls.

{I guess I should mention that I didn't really schedule feedings much during the day a la Baby Wise... I kept a mostly regular schedule of nursing every two hours but there were a lot of daytime "cluster feedings" (nursing every hour or half-hour) once those longer stretches at night started, and I just went with it... as much as it was possible when I was also caring for older siblings.}

We enjoyed about 2-3 months of great sleep, and then... the four-month sleep regression hit.

Let's talk about that tomorrow!

To be continued...

Part two here!