On the other hand, there was a point in the not-to-distant past when we actually thought we were making progress on the night-time sleeping front. Phoebe would require a bath, stories, rocking and a bottle but would go down fairly easily after the nighttime routine. Then, just as we thought we were starting to figure this nighttime thing out, we hit what we assumed was the famed four month sleep regression. Night sleep went all to H-E-double-hockey-sticks. We figured "yeah, this sucks, but it is a sleep regression and this too shall pass". NOT. SO. FAST. We are still dealing with crappy sleep. At this point it looks like our four month sleep regression morphed into a five month sleep regression and chugged along right into the six month. Awesome. At this point we are cursing those weeks of good nighttime sleep - they gave us a fleeting taste of what it would be like to be well rested. Now they haunt us. Is it better to have slept and lost than to have never slept at all? Jury is still out.
Getting Phoebe to sleep has become much harder. We're not sure why, but we think that now that she is mobile she really feels like sleep is just a waste of her time. She has never been a cuddly baby but now she starts fussing the minute she thinks you might be moving in for a snuggle since snuggles often lead to bedtime. She has also gone back to waking up frequently during the night. Many people maintain that a baby her age should be able to go through the night without eating, but the Phoebster DRAINS at least one bottle most nights. We think she is making up for the calories she misses during the day because YO - things are waaaay too interesting for the baby to stop and take a snack break. There has been a marked decrease in the amount she eats during the day, so we think she is compensating by eating often during the night. When we have Phoebe we really try to move her somewhere uninteresting and with minimal distractions during meal/snack time. Obviously at daycare this isn't always a possibility (heap on the parental guilt). For example, today at daycare Phoebe ate six ounces. ALL DAY. Normally one bottle is seven ounces so she ate two partial bottles and that was it.
The other thing that has shifted about Phoebe's sleep pattern is how long it takes her to get back to sleep once she wakes up. During our two weeks of what we now realize was baby-sleep-nirvana, Phoebe would wake up, drain a bottle in 20 minutes and be back asleep in her PnP within 30 minutes of waking up. Now, it can take over an hour to get the munchkin back to sleep after a middle of the night feeding. Whoever covers the night shift pretty much has to count on being awake for an hour and a half some time between 2 and 5 AM. Needless to say, this does not lead to parents with sunshiny dispositions. It has however, created a surge in business for the local Starbucks.
We are just about pushed to the edge in terms of sleep deprivation. We used to joke about how there should be a section in the Geneva Convention covering infants, but now that isn't even funny any more. We're contemplating how to work on the munchkin's sleep habits. To this end, I checked a bunch of baby sleep books out of the library. It seems that these books fall into one of two categories:
- You should never let your baby cry. If you let your baby cry, you are giving her serious attachment issues and she will grow up to be a stripper, looking to strangers for the love she never got from you. If you let your baby cry herself to sleep she will never recover and you are a horrible parent.
- The only way for babies to learn to sleep is to cry it out. If you don't let your baby cry it out you are crippling her for life and she will end up needing her cell mate to rock her to sleep when she is 30. If you don't let your baby cry herself to sleep she will never recover and you are a horrible parent.
It sounds like the books haven't changed much in 30 years or so, at least on this issue. I feel for both of you, having experienced something similar myself.
ReplyDeleteLinda