I want to preface this post by saying that we have a really easy sleeper and are very fortunate that Ellie knew the difference between night and day from the moment she was born. So while I may complain about our current situation, I do understand that it could be worse, a lot worse.
After battling a cold, the flu and another cold, our baby that used to sleep from 9:30PM until 6:30AM has now decided that a middle of the night visit with Mom is a lot of fun (at least for the last week plus). I started reading “Good Night, Sleep Tight” by Kim West. It focuses on the SleepLady’s approach to teaching the child to put themselves to sleep, without going to the extreme “Cry It Out” approach. From reading the book, and looking towards the future, I identified 4 areas that we need to work on:
1. Falling asleep during feeding: Ellie has recently started falling asleep during her before bed feedings. While this isn’t as much of an issue for us, according to the book it is a sign that she is ready for bed earlier than we have been putting her down. Meaning she is not getting the quality of sleep that she should be getting (i.E. she has been taking a nap an hour before bed, instead of adding that time into her nighttime ‘deeper’ sleep).
2. Swaddling: we love to swaddle Ellie and think the Halo SleepSacks are the greatest. Unfortunately, she is not allowed to use them at day-care. And at some point she is going to outgrow them and we are going to have to deal with her jolting herself awake at night. If we are going to work on the other areas, why not tackle this one at the same time and get the pain over with.
3. Walking Ellie to sleep: currently Nick or I, mainly Nick since he is the bedtime guy, walk with Ellie until she falls asleep each night. It doesn’t usually take long to get this done, but it does hinder her from learning to put herself to sleep.
4. Waking up to eat between 3:30AM and 5AM: this is the new habit that started when Ellie got sick. At which point we were just trying to keep her hydrated and healthy- so if she wanted to eat, we fed her. Since she is getting better, I would like to have my night sleeping back.
According to Ellie’s age, it is still alright for her to get up in the night for ONE feeding. Since that is all she has been doing, item #4 is on hold for the next few weeks. Last night was our first night of focusing on the other 4 areas. Here is how it all played out:
Falling asleep during feeding: Nick must not have understood the putting her to bed earlier instead of having her take a nap, because she managed to get a 30 minute nap in at 8PM last night. Which meant she was still tired and fell asleep during her before bed feeding.
Swaddling: we swaddled under her arms instead of swaddling her arms in last night. This did cause her to wake herself up around 2AM last night, at which time she decided since she was up she was hungry and should eat. Needless to say, she was not a happy camper when her mommy would not feed her. I tried some of the comforting techniques the book talked about, but they seemed to make Ellie madder since I was there, but not giving her what she wanted. After 30 minutes of trying to sooth her I gave up and let her cry it out. 15 minutes later she was asleep- on her own.
Walking Ellie to sleep: after semi-swaddling her at bedtime I laid her in her crib and let her be. Within 10 minutes she had fallen asleep. The 2AM wake-up was not as positive (see above). But after she ate at 5AM I semi-swaddled her again, placed her in bed and she was out within 5 minutes.
Overall, not a bad first night. We are all learning and hope that within a few weeks we will have a more established sleep schedule. Wish us luck!
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