Right now weighing heavy on my mind is Anna's sleep schedule. It sucks. There are a lot of issues and we created them ourselves...I guess we were too selfish and I didn't have enough information on the right way to do things and now we are paying the price. Anna has always stayed up pretty late with us and we have always let her take naps whenever and wherever she felt like it. Until about 3 weeks ago that is . . .
We are really at our wits end right now, I'll try to give a quick history. Anna started sleeping 6+ hours at 6 weeks old, and that lasted until she outgrew her swaddle wrap (The Baby Swaddler which was awesome, and in hindsight possibly TOO awesome) and bassinet around 5 months. At that time she also was getting her first teeth and had resulting cold symptoms and just wasn't sleeping well at all - we decided to let her sleep in her car seat (on an incline) in her crib. That was OK for about a week, then her nose cleared up, teeth popped through and ever since then we have been struggling to get her to sleep in her crib.
The large size SwaddleMe blanket worked OK for a night or two, but she is really good at getting out of it and I don't think she has the startle reflex anymore so she shouldn't really need it. We used to hold her in our arms until she fell asleep and then wrap her up and put her to bed and all was fine. I know that she needs to learn to sleep on her own so we started trying cry it out method about a week and a half ago. She is still crying for 20 minutes when we put her to bed and waking up once or twice during the night and screaming for at least 20 minutes. About to give up on cry-it-out, obviously not working.
She has also not had a decent nap since we stopped letting her sleep in our arms 2 weeks ago, she only goes about 30 min twice a day. I have a feeling she isn't getting enough sleep but short of rocking her in our arms I don't know how to get her to shut her little eyes and stay sleeping for a significant amount of time.
We had tried the Ferber Method for a few days, but every time we would go back in to pat her it would get her all riled up again that we were leaving so we cut that off and tried this....but I am not sure how much more I can take, I can't stand to just listen to her cry so much. We were supposed to see an improvement after 3 or 4 nights but it has been 10 and I feel like it is still very hit or miss.
I don't know how much it is hindering her (or not) to be spending some days at home and some days at Grandma's house, but I don't think that can really be the problem since a lot of babies are in day care and they are fine. She will be in day care shortly also so she really needs to learn to fall asleep on her own or, "self soothe".
On the bright side her 2 top teeth are all the way through and just coming down more now so I think most of her pain is gone. And she is slowly getting back to eating more solid foods - she was on strike for awhile when her teeth started to come in so there must be some relation. She is still not eating enough, but anything is better than nothing.
Hopefully by the next post she will be sleeping better. Tonight she fell asleep after about 10 minutes of crying so I guess that is better than 20...I'll take tiny victories wherever I can get them these days :)
I say that we created the problem by being selfish because we allowed her to stay up until 10:30 or 11:00 every night so that we would be spending more time with her after work and then when it was time for her (and us) to go to bed we would just rock her in our arms until she fell asleep and then we would swaddle her up and place her in her bassinet and she was good until the next morning.
Had I been keeping up with the baby's first year books or the baby sleep books I was given I might have seen how important it is to establish a baby sleep schedule as early as 6 weeks. Now, don't get me wrong, I NEVER want(ed) to be come one of those bedtime nazi moms who won't do anything that will disrupt baby's "schedule" but an occasional break is one thing, no real routine ever is another and I think we really missed the boat on this one unfortunately. We are paying for it now. I would have much rather lost this sleep over my maternity leave but hind sight is 20/20 and Anna is happy and healthy so we really can't complain (but we still will of course!)
UPDATE: Last night went much better, only about 10 minutes to fall asleep and she only woke up once in the night, at 5:15 and she didn't cry much just rolled around and then fell back to sleep on her own at 5:30. Fingers crossed!!
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