Saturday, June 4, 2011

Two steps forward, one step back

Napping is becoming an issue in my household.  Just when LM is doing well at night (sleeping from around 10-7 with one middle of the night feed), our naps are starting to get worse.

We try to follow the EASY (eat, activity, sleep, your time) routine and generally we do okay. But--since LM usually likes to eat every 2-3 hours, when he only will nap for 20-30minutes but can't "activity" long enough to fill the gap without crankin' out....we're not doing so well. 

I know he needs to be sleeping at least 45 min at a time....but would fare much better if he'd sleep an hour at a time.  He'll sleep an hour or so around 830ish every morning but then does the cat nap thing for the rest of the day.  He wakes up happy and smiley so I feel guilty trying to put him back down to extend his naps.  Consequently, I end up with a cranky monkey by the evening...causing him to crash around seven and sleep for a good chunk....but not down for the night...causing in issue with clusterfeeding that I swear might push into STTN territory if we could only do it more consistently in the evenings.

So, in case my ramblings have lost you....I need him to nap better all day so I can have him awake enough in the evening to feed him more so he'll sleep through the night......so I can be sane (which really is the endgoal to everything in motherhood).

I try the swing, me, the crib, a carrier, the couch etc etc etc for him to nap on and they pretty much get the same results. At night he's in his Halo Swaddle Sack but it's too hot for the day over regular clothes. He can bust out of his swaddling blankets or swaddling him wakes him up...so they're not working. He also cannot be lain down drowsy to put himself to sleep.  He wakes right up and is happy go lucky.  The only time this works is in the swing...but that's a habit I don't want to be long term.

Basically, I'm at a loss. It's so hard to know that my baby needs more sleep to benefit him in oh so many ways ad I can't figure out how to help him do it.  I'm afraid of getting desperate enough that I let him sleep in all sorts of crazy ways and form bad sleeping habits. He'll be three months old tomorrow and from what I've read, that's the slow beginning of forming good sleep habits.

And here we are, on the cusp of it, and we're heading in the wrong direction. This is what I get for getting excited about him sleeping in his crib :-/

9 comments:

  1. cio. it sucks, but we all have to do it at some point. you can do the cio the easy (or hard) way like we did. at a certain age, the baby no longer needs to eat in the middle of the night, so when our daughter would wake up, we'd go in her room, leave the lights off check her diaper (at first, she stopped pooping at night pretty quickly) without interacting with her and then rock her back to sleep. no feeding. but i'm not sure how old your baby is and if he's ready for that.
    i never thought we'd do cio, and technically, we didn't, but occasionally now we do. louise is almost a year and a half now though, so it doesn't make me feel as bad as it did when she was a small baby new to the world. although, sometimes, i do feel a little bad :)

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  2. What age did you start it? LM is almost 3 months old. He's down to only one night feed right now. I worked hard the rest of the evening on limiting his awake time to about an hour and laying him down...it took awhile but he did fall asleep for a nap that way (we had to replace the paci a few times) and went down for the night a little bit ago. He did it without getting too worked up but I can see how a modified CIO may work in the future--I think he may still be a little young....especially since we just transitioned to the crib a couple weeks ago. I appreciate your experiences with dealing with the middle of the night feed...that might be a good transition.

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  3. oh no, no, she was much older than 3 months, you're right. if you've got him down to one feeding a night, i'd call it good for a bit.

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  4. We're having the same issue over here. Cole has started sleeping "through" the night - goes down anywhere between 10:30 and 12, and then sleeps until 6-7 in the morning. However, about the time he started that, he stopped napping for more than 30-40 minutes at a time during the day and eats every 2-3 hours. He'll be content for maybe 20 minutes on the playmat half the time, but I have a seriously cranky baby right now. Age thing? They'll grow out of it? We can only hope!

    I tried the CIO method on him from birth, because my father MADE me do it (he wouldn't let me get up to go get my son, but promised me "just 5 minutes and I'll go get him"). I tried it for about a week and...all I ended up with was a seriously pissed off baby and a stressed out momma. So...no CIO for us!

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  5. i think three months is a little young. i believe it's four months where they no longer need a nighttime feeding, but we did a pretty harmless version of cio because when my baby cried, my instincts told me to pick her up, i wasn't comfortable leaving a four month old alone in a dark room screaming. we would just go into her room, leave the lights off and quietly rock her back to sleep.

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  6. I think that it sounds more like we're all in favor of a much less severe idea of CIO than most people think of. For me, I go in for a paci replacement, pat etc when I hear his sounds change towards fussy. I can't handle the sounds of him upset...hopefully he develops some good sleeping habits as we muddle through all this because I'm not sure I have the strength to listen to him cry.

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  7. @tigger--even just the few naps I've been more vigilant about wake times with, I've seen a big difference. Right now, he's up about an hour and then I swaddle him up and put him down. I read that I needed to be including "fall asleep time" in his awake time...which I wasn't doing--so I think it was resulting in being overtired. It's taking him about 20-25 min to fall asleep and he's doing it without crying...it's worth a try.

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  8. well, just so you know, we did the less harsh cio and louise has EXCELLENT sleeping habits. she's almost a year and a half now and sleeps from 8pm until 7-8am with a 2-3 hour nap around 12 or 1.

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  9. I'm glad to hear about your experiences with this version of CIO. It's good to know what works for people---it seems like every week there's some new sleep challenge we're faced with! The more info, the better!!

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