Aug. 21: Sylvia is working on her second nap of the day. Which is a really good thing because I was getting desperate about having her nap. After teething and being sick, she somehow got herself to a place where she was only napping once…maybe twice in the morning for an hour or so. By the evening, she’s been an exhausted mess. And even when I work all afternoon to get her to fall asleep, I really haven’t been that successful.
Yesterday afternoon I went over to day-care Karen’s house to help her by watching her kids for the afternoon while she moved her mom into a nursing home. Before leaving, Karen put the two little boys down for a nap. She did it by picking them up, walking them upstairs to their cribs, saying goodnight, laying them down with their pacifiers and blankets, and walking away. There was no fussing or crying. And the boys both slept for two and a half hours. It made me feel like something in my world needs to change!
Karen and I didn’t always see eye to eye on child-raising techniques. She organizes the kids in a very structured way. They seem to thrive on the consistency, but I never found it practical to be all that scheduled and organized at home. Karen really wanted me to track how often I was feeding Andrew, to space out his feedings, to not nurse him to sleep, to let him cry himself back to sleep when he woke from a nap too early, to not ever skip naps because we were out, to only use the pacifier when he was sleeping, etc.
I didn’t necessarily appreciate Karen’s advice. I think that I was happy to work with her, but I didn’t really like feeling like she was telling me how to raise my child. Especially when the advice she was giving me sometimes felt like it was designed to make her life easier at the expense of Andrew’s happiness (don’t hold him all the time, let him cry sometimes, don’t nurse him whenever he wants…).
Karen had encouraged me to read a book called Babywise by Gary Ezzo, which is sort of the antithesis of attachment parenting. The goals seems to be to get your child to sleep through the night, which always seemed to me to be a sort of silly goal. My ultimate goal is to have children who feel loved and content. Who are happy and healthy and who have a strong sense that the world is a warm and loving place. If that meant waking up in the night to feed or comfort them, that’s just fine with me! Dr. Sears and Dr. Brazelton are two of the attachment parenting gurus whom I most identify with. I found them both myself, and Mom later told me that they were two of the parenting resources that she also admired. Attachment parenting includes child-led breastfeeding, lots of baby-wearing, co-sleeping, and generally being very attuned to your baby’s needs. It’s an approach that for the most part, feels very right to me.
Now that Sylvia is six-months-old, I find myself expecting a little more out of her than I did when she was a newborn. She can self-soothe, and her needs aren’t as raw as they were. In fact, “need” is shifting to “want” in a lot of cases. So I’m feeling more confident about pushing her a little to help her gain some independence.
So while I was at Karen’s yesterday, I re-read the somewhat abhorred Babywise. And while I really, really don’t like the fact that he is promoting the strict scheduling of itty-bitty babies, I did find wisdom in his suggestions of how organizing feeding time, wake time and nap time into 3-4 hour repeating segments can work well for babies and parents. So here are some things I’ve decided to try:
- I’m going to work to organize Sylvia’s eating, wake, and nap times more. I generally just follow her cues, but the last few weeks, that hasn’t been leading to good naps. Plus she’s recently up for hours in the night too! So for the most part, I plan to feed her after she wakes up and then wait 2-3 hours before feeding her again. I’m also planning to not nurse her before bed to see if that helps her be able to fall back asleep better.
- I’ve decided (with some trepidation) to let Sylvia cry herself to sleep if necessary. I’ve only let her cry for about 5 minutes or maybe 10, and she’s never fallen asleep…I go in after a while and nurse her down. I let her cry for both naps so far today. I set the timer for 15 minutes and gritted my teeth. The first nap she cried for about 20 minutes, but after the timer went off at 15 minutes, she sounded like she was heading toward sleep so I didn’t go in. Then for this second nap, she cried for about 10 minutes. It wasn’t so bad.
- I’m going to wait until she wakes up happy to go in to get her. Sylvia often wakes up crying after 45 minutes-one hour of napping. From experience with Andrew, I know that a baby who wakes crying probably wasn’t ready to get up, but with Sylvia, once I go in to soothe her, she makes it very clear that she’s wide awake and is not going to return to napping anytime soon. So in order to encourage longer naps, I’m going to let her cry herself back to sleep. [There’s always the chance that she’ll have a poopy diaper or something, so I’ll have to figure out how to manage this one.] Oh, how odd…she just woke up crying. Hmmm… To check on her or not to check. It’s so hard when she’s calling for me and expects me to come. But she needs to sleep more. Sleep is very important for babies. Hey, she just stopped. My hope is that she’ll wake up coo-ing when she wakes rested. urg. she’s crying again.
So that’s my plan. I’ll let you know how it goes. Hopefully longer, more consistent naps will make for a happier Sylvia and a calmer Mom. Wish us luck!