Practicalities

I planned to have this fabulous Emmys post this morning, but I couldn't stay awake. But a quick perusal of the internet shows that no one I care about won an award (except America Ferrera- whoo!). Anyway, I have a much different and much more pressing matter to attend to right now.

At the age of four and something months, did anyone else's sweet good natured child suddenly turn into a teenage girl? There is a sudden influx of Attitude in this house and Phillip and I are not amused.

More personality during the daytime- that's one thing. The kid is a lot more obvious in his likes and dislikes now and occasionally even prefers to be left alone to roll around on the floor rather than snuggling up to any number of the people around here wanting to hold him. But the "personality" that comes out when it's time to sleep, MAN. Our neighbors must think we're skinning a cat.

He can be obviously tired or not, it doesn't matter. When I haul him upstairs to start the take-a-nap stuff, the last couple of days have been exactly the same. Change diaper, maybe read a book if he doesn't seem too sleepy, then lay him horizontal in my arms to start the vigorous swinging and "Hush Little Baby"ing we do to get him to sleep, dare I say it? Quite quickly and easily. BUT NO. Gone are the days of the baby who fell asleep within two verses. The minute I change his position from upright to horizontal something must click in his brain: SLEEPYTIME? NO SLEEPYTIME! and the hollering commences. Full on "I can't believe you just grounded me!" yelling. It's not crying. It's not fussing. It's a four-month-old temper that makes me quiver thinking about the teenage years. And he does it to everyone, not just me. Phillip, who has been putting him to bed since day one, tried to get out of it last night, offering to do the dishes if I'd put the baby down. Dishes!

It's pretty much all Phillip and I can talk about. No one likes to hang out with us anymore. Anyway, we're not sure what to do. Right now the baby is napping and after relatively little rocking, but the rocking that did occur was noisy and violent and required biceps of steel. He is pretty much crying it out while being strapped down and rocked within an inch of his life. Seriously, after a while his eyes are closed and he's falling asleep, but he's still going, "AAAUUUUGGGGHHHH" for ten more minutes in your arms.

And so, I must ask the Internet: at four months were you swaddling your baby? We are. Even though it sometimes seems like the thing Jack wants most in the world is his hands readily available for chewing, he has never slept very long unswaddled. He might go down without being wrapped up, but sooner or later he wakes himself up with scratching or flailing his arms or just random startles. The nights he's slept the longest are the nights he's wrapped the tightest and couldn't get out of his swaddle. (He sleeps swaddled for his naps too, although looser because I can't achieve the life-sucking straitjacketness that Phillip creates for bedtime.)

He seems to get tired around seven or eight and we watch him for any sign of sleepiness during this time. Then we feed him (if he's hungry, we definitely do not have the always-nurses-to-sleep issue), change him, dress him, lotion him up, read a story and do the rocking/yelling thing. One night when we were feeling brave we put him in bed after 15 minutes of rocking, even though he was still awake. We listened to him yell for ten minutes before neither of us could take it anymore and Phillip dashed upstairs. But he was doing the moaning-while-asleep thing. As soon as Phillip stuffed the pacifier in his mouth he was out. So...? I don't know. He's just mad. He doesn't want to go to sleep. He arches his back and tries to vault himself out of our arms. He's not hungry or uncomfortable or wet or hot or teething any of the things we can think of that might make him cry, except TIRED. SO JUST GO TO SLEEP ALREADY.

Then there's the night waking. My God. For a while he was sleeping pretty well, nice long stretches. But now it seems we're back to every couple of hours. If he's wide awake I almost always feed him (and he may fall asleep while nursing or not) but if his eyes are closed we just give him the pacifier and put our hands on his chest to see if he'll go back to sleep. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't, we'll pick him up and rock him and while that used to work really well, now he does the yelling thing.

Is he trying to say, "Leave me alone you morons!" Does he just need to get it out of his system and we're interrupting that process? But if I just put him in his crib to fuss instead of having him do it in my arms, I think he'd just lie there complaining. He wouldn't be sleepy enough to actually fall asleep. That's the other thing- he may be yawning, but he still wants to be bounced on the bed and carried around the house.

One thing I can't complain about is naps. Even if it's hard to get him to go to sleep, once he's out he's out. My child slept for a straight three hour stretch on Saturday. One day he took four one-hour naps, but the next day he took two two-hour naps because I didn't rush in and get him when he started fussing at the one hour mark. So I'm doing that now- waiting to see what happens before I pick him up. Even the nighttime- he's definitely not a horror. We sleep. We take turns attending to the prince's needs. He may yell a lot once in a while, but I can count on one hand the number of times we've had to stay up longer than an hour or two to get him to fall back asleep.

How do your babies/kids go to sleep? Does anyone else's baby moan and fuss in his sleep? 

Remember when I asked for your thoughts on vacation spots? We finally picked a place and made reservations. We're packing up the car tomorrow morning and spending two nights in a room with a lake view. And after that, I think, we are going to start some sleep training. We've been doing a rather half-assed job of it over the last two weeks, but after our little getaway it is ON. Well, once I figure out what we should do. Then it is ON.

(And you KNOW I'm bringing the laptop so I can tell you just how horrified I am when everyone else in the hotel is giving us the stinkeye because our baby kept them up all night.)

Comments

[Jenny Ryan]

Ooh, have a great time on your vacation!

[Maureen]

I am racking my brains trying to remember when we stopped swaddling Jack, and, of course, I can't. This happens in my playgroup as well; Jack is the oldest and when the other moms ask me, "When did he blank?" I never know.

What I do remember is that Emily and I both had long conversations about what we were going to do about swaddling and how we were going to try easing the baby into the no swaddling and oh, God, what are we going to do when the Swaddle-Me doesn't fit anymore, and then for both of us, it ended up being really easy.

So here's my advice, for what it's worth. First, if he's fighting the swaddle to get his arms free, try swaddling his body but not his arms and see if that helps. If he is still struggling, try removing the swaddle altogether. You can always reswaddle if he startles awake or whatever. I suggest this because you don't mention when you last tried putting him down without swaddling, and two weeks is actually a huge percentage of his life, so maybe it's time to try again.

Second, since he's mad-crying and not upset-crying, I would try letting him go for 15 minutes. Now, I'm just repeating what worked for my Jack when he was 10 months, but I waited 15 minutes, then 15 more, and then he was asleep. If you can't take the crying, you can't take it, but 30 minutes won't kill him, and hopefully you'll discover that he just needs 15 minutes by himself to settle down.

Lastly, Moxie says that there is a 4-month sleep regression. Jack never seemed to line right up with the sleep regression schedules, but the youngest baby in my playgroup did. She was an awful sleeper at 4 months. So whatever you do or don't try, he'll grow out of this phase soon. Remember: Everything but everything is a phase where infants are concerned.

[Christina]

That part about Phillip and the dishes cracked me up... I can get Hubby to do all kinds of things if I just frame it right - "Would you rather clean the bathroom or deal with the screaming kids?" ;-)

None of my kids slept through the night until the 1 year mark and my 12 year old still fights sleep, to this day, so I am not much help. Sorry!

[Tara]

we still swaddle at 4.5 months. There was one FLUKE week when she slept through the night without the swaddle, and I really have no idea what that was about. Now she's sleeping better, but still wakes up once or twice, and is sausaged into her swaddle me blanket (though she routinely breaks free).

Hmm... maybe it's time to try sleeping without it again.

Maybe she'd sleep in "the box" without it- ha! She's totally too big for it too, but she seemed to like being able to kick the end of it all night.

[Emily]

At 3 months, Asher was sleeping 10-hour stretches through the night. I thought I'd hit the jackpot.

At 4 months, he started waking up sometimes eight times a night. EIGHT. It got better, around month 5, but it was so wacky there for a while that we just took away the swaddle in the middle of month 4 because we figured it couldn't have gotten any worse. He started sleeping in those sleep sacks instead and he transitioned fine. Of course, that just means he woke up just as much as he did when he was swaddled. During this time he napped like a champ.

Four months was a hard age for us. We never actually did any sleep training but I don't regret it. He figured it out eventually.

[annie]

Yup. I remember going through something bad at 4ish months. How bad, and how we handled it, I can't remember. Sleep training wasn't something we really tried for - just hung with the boy when he wanted to be awake and slept when possible. I do remember that it wasn't until 5ish months that I was able to get him into a nap routine. Best advice I received about sleeping at night time (although it wasn't until about 9 months) was to put him to bed EARLIER. I didn't believe it, but gave it a shot. Christopher went from waking up 4 times throughout the night to sleeping 12 hrs straight. So, maybe try that?

As for swaddling....I was never able to do it right. I mastered the baby doll at childbirth class. But my own baby doll came out about 2 sizes too large for the swaddling blankets I had. So chewing on fists was always an option for Chris. Oh. And crying it out. I think it's really a "to each his own" thing. Some people swear by it. We couldn't even bring ourselves to try it until Christopher was at least 6 months. He was just so little and we just felt wrong about it. Not surprisingly, he came to everything (including sleeping) in his own time. Every once in a while we'll let him cry, but he got himself to the point where he learned how to go to sleep. So I guess my point is - find what is comfortable for you guys and just stick with it. If you're comfortable, Jack will be too.

[karianne]

From the get go of this post, I'm cracking up. We totally joke that Ivy was born PMSing. But in all honesty, it isn't really that funny to live with.