Sleep Weirdness

I guess this is what happens when you go around being smug that your baby is the best sleeper in the world: your baby decides to mess with you.

The nights of 10 straight hours of sleep are gone. Whereas she used to wake up once during the night on occasion, it's now not unusual for her to wake up twice, once at 1 or 2 and again at 5. She's also started going to bed later, which is really weird. I was under the impression that as they get older, their bedtimes get earlier. Sadie's been predictably asleep between 9 and 9:30 since she was 2 months old, so imagine our confusion when, this past week, she suddenly decided that she did not want to go to sleep at 9pm under any circumstances.

Instead, she wants to fuss and yell. For two nights in a row, we put her in her crib at 9pm, drowsy but awake as usual, only to have her fuss for the next hour. We'd go in, pick her up and rock her until her eyes got heavy, but as soon as we put her back down she'd begin yelling again. The longer we went without soothing her, the more frantic she got.

In addition, her reliable afternoon nap schedule has suddenly become, well, unreliable. She used to go down like clockwork every afternoon around 2:30 or 3, and sleep until 5:30 or 6. But in the last few days, she's woken up at 3:30 and not wanted to go back to sleep. Then she cries all evening because she's so tired. It's now become a routine that before any nap, long or short, she yells and fusses and acts generally upset, and this really sucks, especially because she never used to have troubles falling asleep before.

This is really not like her at all, and we've been trying to figure out what the problem is and how to fix it. We've got it into our heads that she no longer wants to be swaddled, which is why she now protests so hard when we wrap her up in the swaddling blanket for her long nap and at bedtime. But when we leave her unswaddled, she hates that too. (Plus she fusses before her short naps too, and she's never been swaddled for those.) She just recently outgrew her Miracle Blanket, and rather than stop swaddling all together, I went the wussy route and bought a couple of giant-size SwaddleMe blankets, the kind that you can practically fit a kindergartner into, they're so big. She has roundly rejected them, for reasons I cannot discern. When I put her in them, she cries and squirms and eventually her arms break loose and then I've got to wrap her up all over again.

So what to do? Stop swaddling, and hope that after a few sleepless nights she'll learn to stop waking herself up by whacking herself in the face with her hands? Continue to use the SwaddleMe blankets until she gets used to them?

Another related problem I'm now facing is that Sadie is becoming more and more reliant on nursing to soothe. This has become apparent over the last couple of weeks, when I started noticing that she was getting hungry more and more often. Then I realized that when she nurses, she isn't eating very much -- she'll quickly get distracted and pull off to start looking around and smiling. Then an hour later she'll start fussing again, and we nurse again. Because she's been so fussy before naps and bedtime, I've gotten into the habit of letting her nurse herself to sleep and then putting her into the crib once she's fallen asleep in my arms.

This is definitely not the sort of habit I want her to get into, and I think it's one reason why she's been waking us up so often at night -- she used to soothe herself back to sleep, and now she fusses to get me to come in and feed her even though she's not that hungry. Yesterday I found myself nursing her three or four times in as many hours, and today I nursed her, then tried to put her down for a nap an hour later, and she refused to fall asleep until I'd nursed her again. When she woke up again after THAT, I did what I'd promised myself I wouldn't do: I got a pacifier and gave her that instead.

And hey, what do you know? It worked like a charm. She's never wanted to take a paci from me before, but today she took it immediately and was asleep a minute later. She hasn't made a peep in over an hour, and I just went back in to her room to check on her, to see she's still got it in her mouth. So it looks as though in order to wean her from the comfort nursing, I'm going to have to start using a paci after all. So much for my predictable baby.