Sleep, sleep, sleep. I feel like it's all I talk about lately. It probably is! My brain feels mushy from lack of it, and lately I seem to have the uncanny ability to repeat myself without remembering that I've already had that particular discussion with that particular person. Pre-kids, I used to wonder why my mom friends and coworkers talked about their kids' sleeping habits so much. Now I know.
Tonight I picked up The 90-Minute Baby Sleep Program again. My mom bought it for me a few months ago and I barely was able to skim it then. After reading a bit in more detail, I feel like a really incompetent mom and like all of Olivia's sleep issues are all my fault. Apparently you shouldn't feed a drowsy baby because they'll associate food with sleep. There was a study done in Pediatrics where one group of moms was told to feed their babies every time they woke in the middle of the night; the other group could feed the babies once between 10 and midnight, but then tried to stretch out the feeding intervals by alternate soothing techniques (rocking, swinging, etc.). At 8 weeks, all of the babies in the alternate soothing group were sleeping at least 5-hour stretches. The group whose babies were fed every time? Fewer than 25% of those babies had accomplished the same thing. Oh, this sounds so familiar. Gah. Can you guess which group we'd fall into? The other night she was up at least every 2 hours, if not more frequently.
The chapter in the book dedicated to 6 months to 1 year recommends letting a child self-soothe to sleep, i.e., crying it out/CIO. *sigh* I just don't think I have the mental/emotional fortitude to do it. Plus I was just reading on the Dr. Sears website last night, and he says that CIO is damaging to babies because they lose trust that their caregiver will come to them when they're upset. I don't know -- it's all so hard.
So, here are some things I've already screwed up:
* babies 3+ months should be going to bed between 6-8 p.m. [She won't even entertain the idea of sleep until 10 p.m.-midnight.]
* babies her age should be taking 2 or 3 long (2-3 hour) naps per day. [She does 30-min. catnaps every 90 minutes from when she wakes up.]
* She's not on any sort of schedule. [I really need to start making her get up at around the same time every day. Some days she wakes up at 7 a.m.; other days, like today, it's 9:30 a.m.]
* See above re: feeding her during her night wakings. She shouldn't be eating more frequently than about every 4 hours at this age, and I shouldn't be feeding her to help her fall asleep.
At least I keep her fed and bathed and diapered and somewhat happy, right?
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
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3 comments:
Don't feel incompetent. It's something we all go through, and honestly, every book and every "expert" has a different theory on sleep, eating, etc. (just like the age-old debate of bf vs. ff). You are doing a fabulous job, you know!
Thanks, Molly! It's so hard not to feel overwhelmed sometimes -- I'm sure that doesn't go away as they get older, does it? I'm such a perfectionist that I don't like finding out that I'm not doing everything right. :p
Throw out all the fucking books. I say that not out of annoyance with you, but annoyance with the system, you know. But seriously, it's all crap. I don't think you can have a true controlled study of baby sleep because it's all too subjective.
Actually, I sort of have a control. I have identical fucking twins. Same DNA. Same room. Same bedtime. Same parenting. One of them started sleeping through the night at 11 months and did so for a good solid year, going from 7:30pm to 8am without a freaking peep. The other? Yeah, not so much for my little Katie. Maybe it's a Katie thing. ;) But that convinced me that it wasn't anything I did, and just their own "thing" for lack of a better term.
That was confirmed again around age 2 when Lilly stopped sleeping through the night and became as much of a nighttime PITA as her darling sister.
So stop blaming yourself (even in a comedic, self-deprecating manner, because we all know that stuff still makes you feel bad). There isn't a right or a wrong in this situation. And I've been saying for years (2.5, to be precise) that the best way in the world to make money is to write a book about baby sleep. I might need an editor, ya know.
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