This is the first of many posts I'm sure I'll make on sleep. Sleep has become the ever elusive quest that I have started for myself and my 4 month old baby girl. When she gets good sleep, I get good sleep. When I get good sleep, I don't lose my mind at 3am feedings.
Sleep is the one subject all parents can talk about at length. When did your baby sleep through the night? How many naps does she/he take and when? It's like some insane badge of competency that you get if you answer the questions correctly. First of all, finally after reading every book about sleep I could get my hands on -- or at least the most well known ones, I have come to the following realizations....
1. Sleeping through the night means 5-6 hours straight. Ok, so Mila does this a lot. Not all the time, but she can do it. In fact, one night she went almost all through the night for real...and it scared me. I woke up that one night at 3am, clutching my chest in pain and realizing she hadn't fed for several hours - SEVERAL HOURS...not 2 or 3 but like 6 or 7.
2. Bedtime needs to be as soon as Mila shows she's tired -- which we try to hope happens around 7ish so she falls asleep at the same time every night - 7:20pm ish. Sometimes it happens earlier...
3. We can't rock her, shhh her, swaddle her, sing her, nurse her to sleep forever...The rocking her to sleep is starting to become physically impossible. The Shhh-ing her...I'll keep doing, the swaddling I'll do until she breaks free every night and can roll over and back in both directions. The singing I will never stop doing. The nursing...well, I know I'm supposed to lay her down sleepy but who doesn't love a full tummy to induce a food coma? We are working on "putting her down when she's drowsy but not asleep." This amounts to putting her in the crib when her eyes are kinda open...but she probably is already asleep. I don't know how we are going to accomplish this task.
4. Naps are so hard to get, but I keep trying -- even if it's to get a short cat nap. My hope is that even though she's not getting all the sleep she needs, at least she is getting some and hopefully it resets her enough to be able to hang longer in the evening until her real bedtime.
5. Don't think you've got it down and the sleep routine is set ... so far in her 4 months, she has varied her sleep pattern so many times that I can't even tell you... I made the mistake at one point into becoming too comfortable with how she was sleeping...JINX...she changed without a warning and that night I went slightly insane. As long as you expect nothing but constant possible change, you will be so disappointed...and who knows how you will react. I realize that Mila cannot be treated the same as my other life goals I've set for myself...Find out how to achieve them and step by step...you get there...No, you do not get there with a baby. She is hopefully going to get there just fine on her own...All you can do is help her have some sort of routine and even then sometimes that doesn't work!
6. If I had to do this part again, I would have approached the first weeks very differently. We had lots of family around so it was impossible to get any sort of routine in place...even though they were so much help to us. I didn't know how to make it comfy for her in our room, I might have really forced the issue on that and let her stay in there with us for a bit longer.
7. Oh I would have bought a white noise machine right off the bat and a sling...I have neither now but hear so many good things about them and wish I had started them when she was way younger. Now, we use the water/wave sounds from her swing to create a white noise barrier with the rest of the house. She also loves looking up at the AC vent when it is on and it seems to help her fall asleep.
I know this post was all over the place, but you see now what lack of sleep has done to me!
