Healthy Sleep Habits, Fictitious Babies

They say that there's no point in trying to hold a baby to a routine; as soon as you figure one out, their habits change. That certainly seems to be holding true for our baby. While she held to a fairly predictable pattern up through the first six months of her life, for the past month she's been enjoying changing things up on us daily.

Her sleep habits were the first thing to change, starting with waking in the middle of the night throughout her growth spurt and continuing afterward. We had one particularly hellish night a couple of weeks ago during which she woke up every hour or two, screaming for me to come in and feed her. See, I'd gotten into the habit of nighttime nursings during the growth spurt because she was so constantly, desperately hungry all the time. Now she was no longer hungry, but still used to having me answer her cries by picking her up and nursing her.

Finally, we had to break her of that habit by doing the Ferber thing -- going in to comfort her every few minutes while she cried, but refusing to pick her up. Needless to say she HATED that, but it was short-lived. After one night of crying, she seemed to remember how to self-soothe; the very next night she slept a full 12 hours. Since then, though, it's been touch and go. Some nights she'll sleep without interruption; the next night she'll wake up two or three times. We go in and put her paci back in her mouth, turn on her musical nightlight and she goes right back to sleep, usually, but the aggravating part is not knowing how soundly she'll sleep from one night to the next.

(We've been having arguments about whether or not to wean her off the pacifier, by the way. Pros: it really does pacify. When she wakes up at night, putting the paci in helps her fall back to sleep immediately. Cons: She needs to have it in order to fall asleep, which means if it falls out she yells until one of us comes to put it back in. Right now we're at a crossroads: do we try to teach her how to put it back in by herself, or do we phase it out before it comes to that?)

Nap times are even less predictable, and for the life of me I can't figure out how to establish a regular nap routine. Even when Sadie wakes up at the same time each morning, her needs are different throughout the day. Sometimes she exhausts herself playing and wants to nap again after only an hour; other times she refuses to nap for 2 or 2 1/2 hours. Sometimes naps are 45 minutes long; other times they are 90 minutes, and most of the time they fall somewhere in between. Putting her to bed at the same time each night makes no difference; there simply seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.

Feeding is a little more consistent than napping, thanks to a regular solid food schedule of three meals a day around 7:30, 11:30 and 5:30. But her hunger level varies -- sometimes she wolfs down a double serving, other times she's uninterested in more than a few bites. Interestingly, the increased solids have done nothing to dampen her enthusiasm for nursing -- actually, the opposite is true. She's started using me as a snack stand. If I so much as hold her on my lap she twists and wriggles, trying to clamp onto me like a lamprey. If I give in and feed her, she loses interest after five minutes, only to be hungry again an hour later. All of this is why I'm starting to toy with the idea of phasing out breastfeeding, which is something I'll address in another post.