How we did it: Infant Sleep Routines (part 2)
Catch up on part one here!
How we handled this varied greatly, much more greatly than what we did for the first four months. So I guess I'll try to remember what we did for each girl individually.
When N was a baby, there was nobody else in the house, and she was in her own bedroom with nobody sharing, obviously. We were also novice parents at the time with no experience of "sleep training". When N started waking more at about 4 months of age, I just went in and fed her for a few months, until I started to get really exhausted. I then asked my pediatrician, at N's 6-month checkup, whether I was being a terrible parent to deprive her of milk at night. The pediatrician answered that if she had slept through the night without milk before, she was not going to starve without it. (This isn't advice I would necessarily agree with, given what I know now about growth spurts and differing baby personalities.) So, we "sleep trained" her at 6 months... meaning that whenever she woke up at night, Daddy would go in and give her a pacifier and a few pats, and if she cried we would let her cry. But nine times out of ten, N would not cry. Her easygoing personality (still true to this day) allowed her to happily accept the pacifier as a milk substitute. She was never a ravenous eater anyway, and was patient about waiting until morning. She might cry for two or three minutes. I think we had one night where she cried for 10. Then it was back to sleep. Of course we were novices, so every minute of her crying felt like 10 years at the time, so I remember it feeling difficult, but it really wasn't.
I say it wasn't difficult, because I now have the perspective given to us by L of what a truly difficult (or I guess I should say typical) sleep experience with an infant can be. Despite following the same pattern I described in part 1, and L pretty consistently sleeping a long stretch in the first 3-4 months of life, she was impossible to "sleep train" after that. Once reaching the four-month regression, she did not sleep consistently well until I weaned her about 7 months later. We tried pretty much everything to get her to sleep at night-- M and I moved to a different room (which, because we only had a two-bedroom apartment at the time, meant that we slept on the pull-out sofa in our living room), we tried having M go in instead of me to give her the pacifier, we tried letting her cry. She was not the type of baby who would self-soothe. If we let her cry, she would cry for 90 minutes to 2 hours, and be no closer to falling asleep at the end of those two hours than she was at the beginning; on the contrary, she would be *more* worked up and upset than when she began. And so, we sort of lived life night to night, doing whatever worked for that particular time (which was mostly nursing or rocking her back to sleep). We had a sprinkling of good nights within those seven months, but mostly bad sleep. I didn't know this at the time, because we were so spoiled by N being such a great sleeper and so easily "trained", but L's pattern was more typical for a baby under 1, I think. In hindsight, I sort of wish we had "fought" with her a little bit less and changed our expectations that she would fit into the mold of N's pattern. She was a completely different baby, with different nutritional needs and growth spurts, and just a different developmental pattern with regard to sleeping independently. When she was 11 months old a couple things happened that were the magic bullet for her sleeping through the night-- she started walking, so she was beyond worn out at bedtime and ready to sleep a long stretch. I also weaned her which meant she was starting to eat more table food and getting more satisfied and full during the day. Lastly, I think she was just developmentally ready to self-soothe more at that age, and so if she did wake up in the night it started to become a little more easy to get her settled.
C's period of good sleeping was slightly longer when she was a young baby, and being a more easygoing personality she was definitely more receptive to help from either Mom or Dad (or pacifier) in getting back to sleep. She was a really great self-soother from day one; in fact I can remember very early on (when she was about six weeks old) I was able to put her down in her crib awake, and she would quietly fall asleep on her own (no crying!). We had quite a disruption when we moved around her 9-month birthday. I attribute this mostly to the fact that, having previously lived in a tiny apartment, having a larger house with three bedrooms was mind-blowing and we were unable to figure out the best arrangement for sleeping at first. Read all about that in this post. After we found a good room arrangement she started happily accepting the pacifier as a substitute, although I do remember a few nights when she was sick or teething and I cashed in on the guarantee of the nursing-back-to-sleep card... and also during other times when I was worried about the other girls waking if she made too much noise. Things get more complicated when you have multiple children, and you do what you have to, more and more often taking the easy way out. They say the baby of the family gets away with a lot, and by default I think that has to be true sometimes. Anyways, as happened with both older girls, weaning was the magic bullet for consistent nights of sleep without interruption. Of course there will be the occasional night waking after that for things like sickness, bad dreams, potty disruptions while potty training, etc. but in my experience they became MUCH less frequent after that first birthday/weaning.
ADDENDUM: Coming back to this post over five years later, to add information about baby J!
The methods from part 1 of this post *sort of* worked with baby J, but because there were more demands on me as a Mama of four, plus we were homeschooling at the time, and I didn't always make it to bed at my designated 8 PM time, and so as a result it took J longer to achieve those coveted longer stretches of sleep at night. There was also just a lot more noise and chaos in our house at the time, and J has never been one to want to sleep when there's something fun and exciting going on in the next room, so even when I made efforts to get her settled early in the evening they were not always successful. I remember the waking every 2-3 hours went on much longer with her during the newborn days, or perhaps it just seemed like longer because my day-times were that much more exhausting (and do you think Mama ever got a nap during the day while homeschooling with a newborn??). Gallons of coffee got me through those days.
So the sleepless newborn days sort of ran into the four-month sleep regression, at which point J was also refusing both a pacifier *and* a bottle, which meant Mama was sort of at my wits' end being the round-the-clock soother. And my Prince Charming of a husband wonderfully swept in once again to help, sending me away for the weekend and bottle-training our baby in a trial-by-fire way. I will never forget how restorative that weekend away was for me.
From that point on, J went in and out of being easily self-soothed. Some times she would put up a fuss, sometimes we would work harder at Dad being the one to help her at night, and other times we just took the easy way out. As mentioned in the paragraph about C, increasing the number of children in your house makes all of these problems more complicated, and definitely by the fourth kiddo you are very much in do-whatever-works-best for the fastest pathway back to sleep for everyone in the house. And honestly, that first year of J's life is very much a blur for me, so my memory is fuzzy on when exactly she was sleeping consistently. I know that around the time of this post (which I only know because I recorded it here, I have no actual memory of it!) it appears sleep was getting more consistent, a couple of months after her first birthday.
So, I think the biggest takeaway I can offer after living through these four experiences of sleep patterns is that there are some ways in which you can influence your baby's sleep patterns and there are some ways in which you cannot. Using your Mama instincts is key. My Mama instincts told me that C would probably accept substitutes other than nursing back to sleep and not get too upset about it. My instincts {eventually} told me that L just needed that extra bit of comfort, and possibly nutrition as well. Getting to know your baby is key, and adjusting strategies and expectations as needed.
Thus ends the story of infant sleep in our household! Hope it was not too boring :) Back with more updates soon!
Comments
Post a Comment