Baby sleep chronicles, background info

This blog should be called "Baby Sleep Chronicles." It IS the main topic. And one dear to my heart. Ha ha.

Anyway, we've had a lot of sleep things happening here. And with the impending surgery, along with the challenges we've been facing, we decided it's time to stop rocking Matthew to sleep for good. And it. is. good.

First some background. One of my priorities from the day Matt was born––well, okay, since the week after the day Matt was born and he was finally eating enough and we didn't have to wake him up every three hours, which was its own kind of awful––was to get him into good sleep habits.

The first couple months were excellent. Matthew consistently slept 7- to 9-hour stretches, in the night, from 2.5 months through about 4 months. We even went to Vermont and San Diego, and it went pretty well. He always fell asleep in his bassinet or bouncy chair or on the floor, sometimes on Jeff, almost never on me, occasionally while being held by one of our friends, and never while eating. He took 3-hour naps every morning.

And then we visited Jeff's parents. There was a lot of crying one day and much screaming whenever we even got near the bassinet (same bassinet; took it with us). After that, we got sucked into horrible-sleep land. When we got home, Matthew did not want to sleep in his bassinet anymore. For days, he cried when we got near it, but not consistently. Sometimes he'd go easily to sleep in it. It was weird. So we decided it would be a good time to move to the crib.

He had an okay transition, but only sometimes. Some nights we had to put him in his bassinet and put it in his room next to the crib. Sometimes we had to put him in the crib and take the bassinet out of his room. Who knows? In the bassinet, we often had to rock him and say "shh" very vigorously to get him to stop crying hysterically. And then he would fall asleep, but not peacefully like before.

Then he started moving a lot, flailing his arms and legs, rolling halfway over. We started rocking him to sleep, though it was really more of a straitjacket approach than a rocking approach: "Stop kicking! Stop waving your arms! Just be still so you have a chance of falling asleep!" The sleeping-through-the-night gradually stopped. I suspect some of the night feeding were due to a growth spurt, but then he got into the routine of waking up and kept waking up when he wasn't hungry.

Naps also became not so great. Thirty to forty-five minutes, usually, many, many times a day, and crying at the end of almost every nap.

And then it was Christmas. Before we had visitors, I would listen to Matt's noises in the night and usually be able to tell if he was actually awake or sleep-crying and about to settle down on his own. But when everyone was here, I didn't want them to wake up a bunch of times because of mysterious baby noises, so I went in right away at night.

All this led to a consistent routine in which we rocked Matt to sleep for every nap and at night, and every time he woke up at night we had to pick him up and set him down, I had to feed him, or I had to rock him back to sleep. I've maintained since his birthday that I've never once minded getting up to feed him, but when it became apparent that Matthew wasn't hungry in the night (won't latch on when not hungry; it's pretty obvious) and was only wanting companionship to fall back asleep, things had to change.

And really, it's not fair to Matthew, either––rocking. Who wants to be lulled to sleep only to be accidentally awoken by being jostled, however lightly, into a crib. And then wake up in a different spot than starting out? And then not be able to stay asleep because you only know how to fall asleep while being held and rocked?

After a horrible, horrible week or so of night-waking and being awake for hours and lots of crying by me and Matthew and lots of me crying to Jeff about the horribleness of it all, we snapped into action! (Also with a lot of tears by me.)

The first step––no more pacifier. I didn't really address this before because it wasn't really an issue. Matthew liked it. He didn't seem to love it. It helped him fall asleep faster half the time, but the other half he chewed on the handle and pretty much thought it was a fun toy.

Daytime naps immediately got longer, though he did cry slightly more for three days before falling asleep. I was still rocking him, though, so the transition wasn't too bad. The worst was really that it was taking up a lot of my time. (Though I could read at the same time, so I really racked up some numbers for the Madison Book Marathon.)

Next step––not getting up in the night every time Matthew cried. Aka "cry it out." This name is misleading because there really was much less crying. But then we got all second-guess-y about whether Matt might be hungry, so I was still getting up to feed him between the hours of 1:30 and 4:30 a.m., after a final night feeding at around 6 or 7 p.m. I think keeping this feeding hindered his ability to settle himself back down to sleep. He's started eating mushy foods like a baby Uncle Ross, so I felt pretty sure he doesn't need to eat in the night anymore.

Then I had the doctor's appointment at which we realized that in the near future I'll have to have surgery, and I will physically be unable to rock Matthew to sleep. And since he doesn't allow Jeff to, and it's been a problem anyway, on Saturday we decided it was time to kick the rocking habit.

Baby sleep chronicles to be continued...