Sleep On It

For Scott's birthday we said to hell with it and drove up to Sunnyvale to make nuisances of ourselves. Sunnyvale is the home of one of my dearest friends from college; she lives there with her husband. By awesome coincidence one of our other best friends was also visiting with her boyfriend for the weekend, so the six of us got together for dinner on Saturday night and brunch Sunday morning.

Sadie held it together fairly well. I'd been worried about two things: the five hour car ride, and the sleeping arrangements. During the day her tolerance for riding around in her car seat is around 30 minutes. We strategized as well as possible, timing the beginning of the trip right around her nap time (with a swim lesson earlier that morning to tire her out) and then stocking the car with toys, a couple of new books and snacks. For sleeping we brought her pack and play, a portable crib that worked brilliantly when we took her to Vancouver over New Year's.

A lot changes in five months.

The car ride, unexpectedly enough, went smooth as silk both times. She napped on the first leg, then we'd stop for lunch and a leg stretch, and pop her back in for the second half. I sat in the back seat with her and kept her occupied by switching out books and toys, singing songs, and playing games.

Sleeping...that didn't turn out so well. She wanted nothing to do with the pack and play, and when she was put in it, she screamed nonstop. On Friday night it took about an hour to get her down to sleep -- mostly because we kept picking her up and trying to soothe her. At home we'd be more likely to let her cry it out, but when you're staying in a hotel the worry that you're driving other people crazy takes precedence.

What finally worked was allowing her to pass out in bed with us. She squirmed and fussed for awhile and eventually draped her upper body on my chest, face up. It looked incredibly uncomfortable, but she was deeply asleep in minutes and Scott was finally able to sneak her into her crib where she slept the rest of the night.

Saturday was even worse -- it took an hour to get her to sleep at our friends' house, and when we got home around 11pm she'd woken up and was furious that we were trying to get her back down into the crib again. We couldn't get her to sleep no matter how hard we tried. At last, around midnight, I begged Scott to come let her sleep in the bed with us since it had worked well the night before. (I love it when he's too exhausted to argue with me.)

So she slept in between us. At some point during the night, she managed to maneuver herself into a position from which she was able to kick us both directly in the face. I don't understand how she did this -- it was too dark to see. All I know is that in the morning we were both equally grumpy from having endured a night full of face kicks. Scott's theory is that she's a ninja.

So after all that she was tired and fussy and ready to go home by Sunday. (In the pre-baby days, we probably would have talked ourselves into staying another night, but this time it definitely wasn't an option.) She only napped for an hour on the car ride home and by bedtime she was the very definition of "overtired." She screamed bloody murder when we put her to bed, and then she slept for 14 hours with another 3 hour nap today.

Oh -- the other bed anecdote I forgot to mention? We discovered on Sunday morning that Sadie was allergic to the detergent on the hotel bedsheets. She woke up covered head to toe in a bright red rash. We treated it with an Epsom Salt bath and a shitload of Aquaphor ointment, and she's better today. SEE, COLLEGE FRIEND? I SAID IT WASN'T SCABIES.

Oh.

As you guys know if you've been keeping up to date with my incredibly boring sleep-related blog updates, Sadie was driving us both batty with the random 5am wake-ups, at which point she always wanted to eat before going back to sleep for another 90 minutes if we were lucky.

It was what finally encouraged me to start considering making the switch from breastfeeding to formula, something I wasn't especially inclined to do otherwise -- everyone kept telling us that formula fed babies sleep longer. To which I wanted to say, "But you guys don't understand. She always slept FINE up until six weeks ago. Hunger isn't the problem. The problem is...crap, I don't know what the problem is. Babies are weird."

Making this switch -- even considering making this switch -- has inspired a deep-seated guilt that I wasn't prepared for. Because why would I feel guilty? Fewer than 20% of American mothers are still breastfeeding their children past the age of six months, and here I've been going for seven and a half. The reasons for this guilt are many, and I won't go into them in too much detail -- not because I don't want to, but because I don't feel like I should have to, and the fact that I still do is all kinds of messed up. Let's just say that it can be difficult to be a modern American mother and speak the word "formula," if you aren't prepared to deal with a lot of raised eyebrows and tsking.

So anyway, we talked about it a lot and I cried a couple of times and ultimately I came up with this ABSURDLY complicated gameplan for weaning Sadie which involves not just slowly increasing the number of bottles she takes per day, but also decreasing the amount of breast milk in each bottle while upping the amount of formula, which by the way MUST BE ORGANIC and kind of smells like fish and the first time I sniffed it I thought, "Sadie is going to HATE this stuff and she will never forgive me for not letting her nurse until she was three years old like the crunchy mothers say I should do and OH MY GOD I AM A BAD MOM."

Okay. Well. This week, we implemented The Plan.

The Plan, I should mention, involved not just introducing formula into her diet, but also discouraging her 5am wake-ups by trying to allow her to cry herself back to sleep. We've been prepared for a very rough week, in other words.

Here's how it went:

Monday: Nursing, bottle, bottle, bottle, nursing, bed. She couldn't get enough of the bottles. By the end of the day she was like, "Oh, what? Boobs? No really, I couldn't drink another drop." And then she slept through the night without a peep.

Tuesday: Repeat of Monday.

Wednesday: Repeat of Tuesday, with the exception that I made the stupid error of skipping a feeding mid-day because she didn't seem hungry. Along came the 5am wake-up, finally, at which point it was like a big flashing light in my head said: YOU IDIOT, SHE'S BEEN HUNGRY THIS WHOLE TIME. THAT'S WHY SHE'S WAKING UP CRYING AT 5AM.

So, duh. There you have it. We've been beating ourselves up for making the switch to formula, convinced we were doing it for purely selfish reasons, only to discover that Sadie is fuller, happier and sleeping better all around. I kind of wish I'd done it sooner, except that I don't, because every time I think about the fact that I won't be sharing that special time with her anymore, those silent 5am feedings where she falls asleep in my arms in the rocking chair while the world sleeps, it makes me want to cry a little bit more.

Ack. Sleep. Where?

I've been holding off about blogging again about Sadie's sleep ups and downs, because in the back of my mind I'm always thinking "tonight's the night she'll grow out of it. Tonight, she goes back to the baby she was six weeks ago. I know she's capable of sleeping 12 hours in a row -- she used to do it all the time. Damn it, where did that baby go?"

Well, I finally had to admit that it's not going to happen on its own. As we were warned by our doctor and pretty much everyone else, Sadie's sleep is no longer as peaceful as it once was. And as we muddle through the process of trying to change her now erratic nighttime patterns, our perspectives on how to respond to her constant wake-ups are changing too.

It all started right around the 6-month growth spurt, which I detailed a few weeks back. Sadie was waking up multiple times during the night, always ravenously hungry. When the growth spurt petered out, the habitual wake-ups continued, and it wasn't until I realized she wasn't actually hungry anymore that I was moved to do anything about it.

Thus followed a couple of very painful nights in which we practiced a modified version of the "cry-it-out" method of baby sleep training, which, depending on who you ask, is either a lifesaving invention or child abuse. Call it what you will, but Sadie responded well to it. After only a few nights of going in periodically to pat her reassuringly and replace her pacifier each time she woke up and cried, she figured out that tears weren't going to get her picked up and nursed, so she stopped crying.

Well...sort of. The wake-ups decreased, but they didn't cease entirely. And as of late, they've fallen into a distressing pattern: Wake-Up #1 comes right as we're getting into bed, around 10:30 or 11. Wake-Up #2 hits right around 5am. Wake-Up #3 is usually an hour and a half later, at which point she's up for the day and Mom is bleary-eyed yet again. Also, I'm not talking quick wake-ups; its no longer possible to make her fall instantaneously back to sleep just by putting her pacifier back in her mouth. When she's awake, she sometimes wants to be awake for awhile. And I admit, this is really my fault -- I'd gotten back into the habit of nursing her multiple times at night, just because it's the quickest way to get her to fall back asleep.

I mean look, we're not complaining over here. She's been an absolute dream of a baby, and we're lucky that we got to brag about her sleeping abilities for as long as we did. We definitely deserve a healthy helping of Sleepless BabyCake at this point. But that doesn't make the waking up any easier, and so last week we once again resigned ourselves to employing Cry-it-Out, aka CIO, aka The Ferber Method, aka The Fastest Way to Get Attachment Parents On Your Butt.

Here, in brief, is how the method works: when your baby wakes up and cries, you first wait a minute to see if she'll put herself back to sleep. (If she's anything like Sadie, she never does.) Then, you go in to check on her. Soothe her by replacing her pacifier or patting her chest lightly, but don't speak to her or pick her up. Leave the room, let her cry for three minutes, then go back in and repeat the same actions. This time, let her cry for five minutes, then ten, then every ten minutes until she gets tired enough to fall asleep on her own.  The idea is to help your baby understand that while you aren't going to pick them up, you're still close by.

First, we tackled the 11am wake-up. Night #1 was a resounding failure. The first time she cried, expecting me to pick her up, Scott went in there instead, and she was REALLY not happy to see him. Something in her panicked shrieks yanked me to my feet and down the hall, where I vaguely remember SHOVING my husband out of the way so I could grab the baby before she could be any more traumatized, despite the fact that I was half-asleep as this was going on.

Night #2 worked better. This time I was the first one in there, and although she was mad at me for not picking her up, I only had to go in one more time before she stopped crying and fell asleep. Night #3, she woke up again but quickly fell back to sleep once her paci was back in place. By the next night, she was sleeping soundly and since then it seems she's managed to drop the 11pm wake-up entirely.

So. Now. It's time to move on to the 5am wake-up. This one is going to be a toughie, and Scott and I both know it. In fact, we made a pact today that beginning next Monday, we will resign ourselves to getting no sleep between the hours of 5-6am for several days straight, because I know Sadie is not going to like having her 5am feeding phased out. Once again, this is my fault. I hate getting up early, and so when Sadie wakes up, the only thought going through my head is, "MUST GET HER BACK TO SLEEP IMMEDIATELY." So I nurse her, and she falls asleep in the rocking chair, and then she goes back into her crib and I back to my bed and we both sleep for another hour or two, and that's all well and good, except...

...we're going to start formula soon.

And I'll be damned if I'm going to get up every morning at 5am and warm up a bottle, feed it to her, then put her back to bed and try to get back to sleep myself. There's just no need for it. I know she can sleep in until 6:30 or 7, because she used to do it every single freaking morning. Sorry, kid, but both you know and I know that you don't really need that 5am meal.

Ooh, I'm dreading this so much. As much as Sadie balked at the 11pm Ferberizing, (and the Ferberizing that came before it) I can't imagine what her response is going to be to the news that the nice warm meal she's taken for granted so many dark mornings in a row will no longer be forthcoming. Something tells me the paci is not going to help with this one. All we can do is pray nobody calls CPS on us as we lie in bed, gritting our teeth and checking the clock to see if it's time to go back in and pat her again.

Cross your fingers for us. 

 

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.

6 Month Check-In

Happy half-birthday, Sadie.

Anything I try to express about how fast these past months have gone or how much it blows our mind that she's as big as she is, will only come off as trite and boring. So why not go to my defacto complaining?

It used to be so much easier to put her down for a nap. Now she finds everything interesting, from the silhouette of her hand in front of her face, to the little faces on the feet of her pajama bottoms, to the toys hanging from her broken mobile that doesn't even move. It is an immobile. Yet she is fascinated by it. Not to mention her newfound ability to wiggle means that she no longer stays where you put her. Scooting backwards, that's ancient history. She mastered that weeks ago, and now prefers to sleep with her head mashed up into the corner of the crib. No, today she discovered how to use her legs to push herself around sideways in a circle, like imagine Donald O'Connor bicycling in circles while lying on the floor in "Singing in the Rain." As I type this, I can see her on the baby monitor and she's lying cross-wise with her head up against the crib bumper, playing with her nightlight with her feet.

Yet STILL no rolling. At her six-month doctor's appointment on Monday, the pediatrician listened as we explained that she doesn't roll.

"Oh, lots of babies don't like to roll back to belly. But she rolls belly to back, right?"

Um, no. She doesn't roll AT ALL.

"Oh. Really?"

That's not what you want to hear a pediatrician say. Of course, she followed it up immediately with the reassurance that Sadie will figure it out on her own time and we shouldn't worry. I'm not worried, really. She already sits up perfectly well -- today she managed a 10-second stretch before toppling over -- but Scott's a little anxious. I think he has a mental image of a 15 year old daughter who just lies on her back all day, tugging at the toys on her mobile and chewing on her pacifier. Still, the day she finally rolls for the first time will be the day we celebrate.

What else? Oh, feeding. Hoo boy. Her stats at the doctor were a little troubling: while she's in the 90th percentile for height for her age, she's only in the 25th percentile for weight. We got the instructions to begin feeding her three times a day instead of her usual one, and that has proved more of a challenge than I had anticipated. She loves oatmeal, you see, but she's highly suspicious of everything else. Her reaction to apples was as follows: *confused face* *rapid inhale* *choking sound* *saliva and apple puree all over her bib, her face and her tray* *fussing*.

But all that is nothing compared with her reaction to her sippy cup. For reasons I cannot comprehend, her sippy cup inspires only her deepest and most passionate emotions, from fascination "Wow! This thing has handles, and it dispenses water!" to utter terror "I want this thing nowhere near my face! AAAAAAAAAAGH!" Twice, a feeding session has been ruined when the sippy cup got a little too close and she burst into hysterical tears. What, I wonder, is the big deal with the sippy cup? And will I have to banish it to the cupboard so I can distract her long enough to tolerate apples?

4 Months and Growing

Last week Sadie had her four month check-up. She continues to be about average to slightly above-average in weight (clocking in at 13 lbs. 12 oz now), but the real shock was her height. She went from average length at her 2 month check-up, to 80th percentile this time around (25 1/2"). "She has the legs of a nine-month-old," our pediatrician informed us cheerfully. Well, that explains why her feet are busting out the bottom of her 6 month sized pajamas. Unfortunately, she's also pretty skinny, which means that even though her legs are long, her body is thin, so all the material in her clothes bunches around her body and occasionally into her face. She'll be rocking the 6 month size awhile longer before I can move her into the next size up.

Sadie was none too happy to get her vaccinations. I think it was worse than last time, in fact, because her lungs are better developed and she's a lot more in the moment than she was at 9 weeks. I made Scott be the one to hold her arms down this time, so he could know what it feels like to be the bad guy. That turned out to be a mean thing to do -- I think it really upset him. At any rate, she was fussy for a few days afterward, but went back to her normal happy self fairly quickly.

I don't imagine there's an actual connection, but it seems like her vaccination weeks always come hand in hand with some new developmental leap. Last time, the day she got her shots was also the day she first laughed (not at the same time. Naturally). This time, she seems to have discovered her feet. Her new favorite pasttime is lying on her back, grabbing her legs and attempting to shove her toes in her mouth. Still no rolling, though.

The doctor also told us that starting at 5 months we can start feeding Sadie solid food. My emotional response to this news was about the same as it was to the news that we were going to be having a girl: I got all weepy inside and thought, "Oh my God, I'm catching a glimpse of the future." The thought of sitting Sadie in a high chair, spoon-feeding her strained peas, just does not jibe with my mental picture of her, in which she is perpetually very tiny and has no upper body strength.

While I'm excited to move to that next stage, I'm also saddened by the thought. For more than 4 months now, Sadie has been exclusively breastfed. I never set out to do it that way -- I was always open to the idea of supplementing with rice cereal or straight-up formula feeding if breastfeeding didn't work. But it was never necessary. Breastfeeding, from day one, has been a pleasure. It wasn't always easy -- yes, it hurt the first few weeks (especially at the beginning of mealtime when Sadie would first chomp down and I would involuntarily wince and make what Scott referred to as "that face"). And pumping, of course, is a giant pain in the ass, especially when you have to travel hundreds of miles with a giant mechanical breast pump and dozens of accompanying tiny plastic parts in your suitcase.

Those things aside, though, I can honestly say that feeding Sadie has always been the best part of the day. I love the little "ah, ah, ah" sounds she makes when I sit her down on my lap and she knows the milk is on its way. I love the memory of her when she was only a few weeks old, bobbing her head like a chicken as she tried to locate the right body part to latch onto. I love her "milk drunk" face, where milk dribbles down her chin and her eyes get all heavy and she looks like she's thinking, "ohhh man, I overdid it again." I love the intimacy of it, and how together we've gotten it down to a science, and how convenient it is, and these are all things I will miss one day when she doesn't need the boob anymore.

Sigh...okay, emotional sniffy-ness over, I promise. Several people have asked us what kind of sleep schedule we keep Sadie on, and now that she's becoming consistent, I thought I'd write it down here. I should warn you in advance, though, that Sadie's a very nappy baby and apparently needs more sleep than your average 4 month old. All times are variable by an hour or more:

6:30am: wake up, eat, go back to sleep

9:00am: wake up for good

10:30am-11:30am: morning nap

1pm-1:30pm: midday catnap

3pm: here's where things get dicey. We used to be able to count on Sadie to go down for a solid 2.5 or 3 hours here, but more often now she cries and gets cranky but won't actually sleep until 4pm.

4pm-6pm: afternoon nap, often with wake-ups. I put her paci back in and she goes back to sleep, or sometimes I have to bounce her until she stops crying and gets sleepy again. I've been known to nurse her back to sleep even though according to the doctor this is a no-no.

9pm: bedtime

We've tried to experiment with the schedule, but this seems to work the best. She refuses to take a nap between 6 and 9pm, so if she wakes up at 5pm instead, we just put her to bed an hour earlier and she's cool with it.

 

New Routines

Tomorrow Sadie turns four months old. She continues to change every single day. Just when I think I've figured out who this little person is, she changes into someone completely different. The baby she is now is not the baby she was at three months old. Hell, she's not the baby she was two weeks ago.

The biggest change is her new sleeping schedule -- she no longer goes down for a nap after 90 minutes, but stretches it out to two hours at a time. The short catnaps are becoming longer, and the long afternoon nap, which used to be reliably 2-3 hours long, is now spotted with constant wake-ups. Luckily, she does go back to sleep again, but no more uninterrupted stretches of blissful daytime sleep.

The swing, which used to be her best friend, she now treats with disdain at best. This is definitely a recent change that happened in a big hurry when it did happen. It used to be that if I wanted her to nap I'd bundle her up in a blanket so that her arms were pinned to her sides, pop her in the swing, turn on the overhead mobile and within a few minutes she'd be out.

Then, she began to fuss before falling asleep. Turning her head side to side, wriggling, then finally sleeping. Things began to wake her up more easily -- Pepper barking, me opening the back door -- and when she woke up, she had no desire to be in the swing anymore.

Finally, this past week, she has let us know loud and clear that she does not want to nap in the swing anymore, ever. Put her in there and she screams bloody murder. She'll be in the swing for playtime -- MAYBE. For a little while. But sleep, no. Fortunately, this refusal of the swing has come hand in hand with a newfound tolerance for hanging out in her crib, something she never used to do unless she was swaddled and already drowsy.  So there you go -- nap time is now in the crib, permanently.

The second change -- and I NEVER saw this coming -- is that she has decided she likes a pacifier after all. The first time I discovered this was right before I wrote my last blog post, in which I expressed frustration over why it was so hard to get Sadie to fall asleep.

Well, she doesn't cry any less when she's tired, but we've both discovered that if you pop a pacifier in her mouth, she instantly mellows out and goes into her nice, quiet alpha state. Go figure -- she used to want nothing to do with the "paci." It was like a poor excuse for a boob, and she used to be furious with me when I tried to offer it to her. And I used to appreciate that, because my fear has always been that she would get too attached to the paci and it would be tough to wean her off of it.

Now? Ha. If she wants it, she can have it, man. That tiny piece of rubber and plastic has been a lifesaver. They don't call it a pacifier for nothing.

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.
 

Right Now I am Bored

And it's for a miraculous reason. The reason is, Sadie has been sleeping for the last three and a half hours.

Before that, she slept for another three hours.

Before that, she slept ten hours straight last night.

She's eaten a total of four times in the last 24 hours. This, from a baby who up until recently used to eat every 2-3 hours with a break in the middle of the night. Four times in 24 hours.

It's so weird, she's growing up.

We Have a Weirdo Baby

First she drove me crazy these past few days by refusing to sleep more than 30 minutes at a stretch. Not counting nighttime, but still. Do you know how hard it is to get ANYTHING done when your 10 week old baby is only sleeping 30 minutes at a time, every 2 or 3 hours? It is really, really hard.

Because you can't just pop them in the swing and walk away, you see. Babies have lightning-quick attention spans. So you must constantly be entertaining them with a rotating succession of positions, toys, movements, etc.

Here, for your entertainment, is a sample of what Sadie's schedule is like over the course of a couple hours when she is feeling particularly sleepless, snacky and cantankerous:

- Feed

- Burp

- Diaper Change

- Smile at silly faces on the changing table

- Change outfits (then cry)

- Get lotion put on dry spots (then cry)

- On boppy pillow on top of the bed, more silly faces

- Stare at rattle being shaken in face, whack with hand

- Cry

- Sit in bouncy seat, stare at purple hippo

- Cry

- Lie face-up on play mat, stare at flashing lights

- Flipped over for tummy time on play mat

- Cry after 2 minutes on tummy

- Feed again

- Burp

- Into swing

- Cry after 10 minutes in swing

- Placed into "Moby wrap" carrier while Mom does chores around the house

- Wriggle and fuss

- Taken out of Moby, wrapped in blanket and bounced in Mom's arms on yoga ball

- After flirting with sleep, decide instead to barf all over self, onesie, and Mom's arm

- Back to the changing table for onesie change, cry because tired

- Wrapped back in blanket and bounced some more

- Drift off to sleep

- Wake up 30 minutes later and DO IT ALL AGAIN

So this has been my last two days. Can you blame a girl for wishing, a few fleeting moments at a time, that she still lived the quiet, productive, childless life? Luckily, Sadie decided to make up for it on Wednesday night by giving me the best gift I could ever have asked for:

She slept for TEN AND A HALF HOURS straight.

Can I just bask in smugness, just for a tiny minute?

Okay, I'm done. No, wait:

OHMYGODOURBABYISAWESOME.

Okay, NOW I'm done.

Local Infant Breaks Own Sleep Record

Valley Village, California -- Six week old Sadie M. shattered her own previously held record of five and a half hours of straight sleep last night at her home in Valley Village.

Sadie stunned onlookers when she fell asleep after a feeding at 9:45pm on Monday, November 2nd, and did not awake again until 4:15am on November 3rd. While the baby has been gradually increasing her sleep time over the past few weeks, the six and one half hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep went above and beyond all predictions.

When asked about her achievement, the brown haired, blue-eyed infant credited a grueling pre-bedtime regimen of physical activity, refusal to nap, and ear-splitting screaming.

"The trick is to allow Mom to rock you right to the brink of sleep, then whack yourself in the face with your fist to wake yourself back up," said Sadie. She then punctuated her sentence by ripping a long fart and blowing several raspberries.

Proud parents Scott and Amanda M. were not available for comment, having snuck away for a nap while their daughter was being interviewed, leaving reporters a bottle of expressed breast milk and a burp cloth. (AP)

Sleeping Like a Baby

Scott and Sadie sleep

If there were one word to define how we're all feeling these days, it would be "tired."

Also, whoever came up with the phrase "sleeping like a baby" was smoking crack. Babies do not sleep. They nap, sort of. But Sadie's days of passed-out, comatose sleep are already behind her. The kinds of things she used to sleep through, like dog barks and people banging into things and the ringing phone, are now likely to wake her up.

And we cannot have that. We must keep the baby sleeping. Because when the baby sleeps, we...well, we don't sleep. But we at least are able to do things like eat lunch and clean up messes and fold laundry.

Seriously, I am so, so tired. I'm not throwing this out there because I think it's a particularly unique complaint -- but I'd like to record for posterity how tired I am right now so that if we decide to have another child, I can go back through these entries and remind Scott of how tired we once were.

The nature of this weariness is nothing I've ever experienced before. It's not that we get no sleep, ever. I hear horror stories of mothers whose babies wake up every hour or two throughout the night, or who scream until 2am. We're not those people -- in fact, Sadie's pretty easygoing as far as five-weekers go, and if this is the worst it's going to get then we really did get off easy.

So I'd say we both probably get between 5 and 7 hours of sleep every night. But it isn't quality sleep, and it isn't consistent sleep. And somehow, 7 hours spread out between two three-hour stretches over the course of the night and an hour nap in the afternoon leaves me as bleary-eyed and exhausted as if I hadn't slept at all.

Here's our current routine:

One of us takes Sadie into the bedroom around 10pm and gets her to sleep in her crib by 11. (There's no way to get her to sleep earlier than this -- she's developed the power to stay wide-eyed from 7pm right through the end of the 10 o'clock news. Any attempts to put her in her crib are met with EXTREME pissiness.)

We then join the other one in the bedroom, where it turns into a quest to fall asleep quickly so as to utilize sleep time as efficiently as possible. That, of course, inevitably results in not being able to fall asleep quickly.

On a good night, she'll go until 3am. Last night she went until 4am -- a marathon five-hour sleeping stretch that would normally have been cause for celebration...only, I'd woken up at 2:45am, and stayed awake for an hour expecting her to start fussing at any moment.

From 3-4 ish, she gets fed, burped, changed and bounced on the yoga ball to an endless succession of lullabies. This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour -- or longer, if she happens to nurse than then, ten minutes later, VOMIT ALL OVER HER NICE CLEAN CLOTHES right after I've changed her, necessitating a second changing and also a change of clothes and ROYALLY PISSING HER OFF in the process because it's been cold here recently and the front bedroom is like fifty degrees at night and being naked on a changing table in a freezing cold room is not where a baby wants to be.

NOT THAT THAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT OR ANYTHING.

So after this, there's perhaps time for one last stretch of sleep until daylight, which is when Scott gets up and heats up a bottle and Sadie screams the entire time, which echoes through the baby monitor that rests on the nightstand exactly six inches from my ear, and insures that all three of us are now entirely awake.

Oh, and? It bears mentioning that one Sadie's had her morning meal and we're both good and awake, she smiles at us, drifts right back off into dreamland and proceeds to nap for the rest of the morning.

It's a good thing she's so damn cute.