Hellobee

This is the tale of two very different attempts at sleep training, and our experiences applying the two opposing theories of getting babies to sleep through the night: do you keep an infant awake during the day so he sleeps through the night, or does sleep beget sleep?

The first time around, we had heard great things about 12 Hours Sleep By 12 Weeks Old by Suzy Giordano and tried to follow the recommendations of the book. It was a huge disaster and we had one unhappy baby who never napped properly, slept poorly through the night and, as a toddler, still isn’t the world’s best sleeper. To this day, Mr. Dolphin and I question whether our attempts to keep Lion up too much during the day totally screwed up his ability to nap.

With our second child, we went with the “sleep begets sleep” approach and pretty much let Panda sleep as much as he wanted, whenever he wanted for the first several months of his life. Between Lion and Panda, we had also read Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman and implemented “Le Pause.” Panda slept six hours at night immediately, eight hours by a month, and eleven hours by about three months. He was a very sleepy baby, literally sleeping twenty hours or more for the first month of his life; it was such a surprise and so different from our experience with Lion, that I actually asked our pediatrician whether it was normal for a baby to sleep so much. He’s had some bumps in the road with sleep regressions, but overall is a much better sleeper than Lion.

Lion’s Sleep Training

We started Lion’s sleep training early, at around 8 weeks old, but he had hit whatever weight recommendation is recommended in the book 12 Hours Sleep by 12 Weeks Old. This book goes with the theory that if you keep a baby up during the day, he will be more likely to sleep at night and that you have a “toolkit” to use to help a child learn to sleep through the night. I went back to work part-time at 6 weeks, full time at 8 weeks, so implementing the Giordano’s approach fell to Mr. Dolphin who started full-time paternity leave at 6 weeks.

The book recommends that you limit the number of hours that a baby naps, suggesting two total naps per day, with one nap being one hour and the other nap being two hours. You are supposed to wake them up if they stay asleep too long. During the day, you are supposed to stretch out the time between feedings to four hours, as well. Because you are stretching out the time between the feedings and keeping them up most of the day, you are spending a lot of time trying to stimulate the baby, entertaining them with a playmat, reading them books, singing to them, etc. Additionally, the book suggests a “toolbox,” like offering a baby a pacifier during the night to help them sleep, as opposed to giving them a bottle or breastfeeding them. The idea is that you stretch out the time between the night feedings while also reducing the ounces of milk/formula you are offering, until you can drop the feedings.

Lion had lost more than ten percent of his body weight—I can’t remember the exact percentage, but it was somewhere around 12 percent—by day four of his life. The pediatrician explained that he simply wasn’t getting enough to eat through breastfeeding (and after I had several frustrating pumping sessions where I produced less than one ounce at a time, I can definitely see why poor Lion was starving!). She gave us some formula to supplement with and instructed us to wake him up every two hours around the clock. We did this for almost two weeks before we were instructed to cut back to every three hours. It was obvious that Lion had gotten used to eating frequently, though, and we struggled to stretch out the time between each meal.

Adorable, lovable child. Not a good sleeper.

With respect to daytime naps, there were times when Lion wanted to go down for a nap, but we tried to follow the schedule we had designed for him based on the book’s recommendation. Mr. Dolphin would tummy time him, spin the butterflies on the playmat, and dance with him in the hopes of keeping him awake. Lion was often fussy (though he was a fussy baby before the nap training, too) and clearly overtired when he was then unable to sleep despite being up for many hours. His napping was extremely erratic and just a few weeks after starting in an in-home daycare, he was kicked out, in part because he refused to nap.

By four months, we still had not successfully dropped his two night feedings. I think we dropped down to one night feeding at around five months, then completely dropped night feedings a little before six months. Here’s where I think the whole waking him every two hours made sleep training difficult: he had gotten used to feeding every two hours and we had to work on eliminating five night feedings! He was down to three fairly quickly, but it was still tough dropping those down to zero.

Once we had completely dropped the night feedings, on the recommendation of our pediatrician we tried cry-it-out. It was a disaster. We tried it several times and each time, Lion won. The first time, he cried for well over an hour and definitely showed zero signs of stopping. The second night, he again wailed until we got him. After that, I gave up and we would let him cry for up to ten minutes, before we would go in to soothe him. There were times where he would calm down within the ten minutes and go to sleep, but anything more than that and he would not put himself to sleep. Prior to trying cry-it-out, we had tried the extinction method, with similarly limited success.

At five months old, Lion moved to a new daycare and was much happier. That daycare provider is not too keen on a structured schedule for infants, saying that they should be on the individual baby’s schedule and not the other way around. At the time, this was a blessing because I had feared that Lion would be kicked out again. The downside was that his eating schedule and sleeping schedule were both very unpredictable. Some days he would take three short naps, other days one nap. Some days, he would drink five bottles and eat solids, other days just four bottles. We didn’t worry about it too much, though, because our main goal was ensuring that we didn’t have to scramble for another daycare situation.

By nine months, Lion had dropped down to a single nap early in the morning and the daycare providers were completely unable to get him to nap a second time, or to nap later in the day. He would often wake up at 4:30 in the morning and be up for the day, refusing to fall asleep again. He would then take his one and only nap of the day at 8:30a.m. or 9 at the latest. Sometimes, he would have a longer nap of ninety minutes, other times he would nap for thirty minutes. Then, he would be up by 10 a.m. and not sleep again until 6:30p.m. Predictably, he was extremely cranky and overtired by the end of the day, being up for eight or more hours at a time.

Eventually, when Lion moved to the toddler room, the teachers were able to coax him into a longer mid-day nap. But for the first year, his nap schedule was a disaster (and has some issues even today). The fact that he slept so little definitely did not help him in sleeping longer at night, either. We tried everything to get him to sleep past 4:30 or 5, but nothing seemed to work. We shifted his bedtime slowly from 6:30 to 8pm; the only result was that he would continue to wake up at 4:30 and have even less sleep. He was also still somewhat frequently waking in the middle of the night, and would require us to find his pacifier before he would fall back asleep. That first year felt like one big ball of crazy and, knowing we were pregnant with Panda, I vowed to do things differently.

Even today, Lion is not the best sleeper. He has a hard time falling asleep now and will often wake up several times in the night and require one of us to go in and help him fall back asleep; based on the four hour intervals at which he wakes, our pediatrician thinks he may be having trouble shifting from one sleep cycle to another and waking in between. For the first few weeks after he transitioned to the toddler room at daycare, he was very fussy until the infant teacher told the toddler teacher that the secret to keeping Lion happy is ensuring he is busy all the time.

I definitely wondered whether for Lion, 12 Hours Sleep by 12 Weeks, actually did more harm than good. First, I questioned whether working so hard to keep Lion awake during the day made it hard for him to learn nap. I wondered whether keeping him up all day made him overtired and caused him to wake up multiple times during the night, and be up for good at a very early hour in the morning. Finally, I wondered whether all of the stimulation we gave him at a young age in our attempts to keep him awake and not clamoring for a bottle caused him to require constant stimulation. While things have gotten better in the last year and every child is different, I sometimes wonder if things would be different had we tried a different approach.

Panda’s Sleep Training

Panda’s sleep situation has been different from the start, in part because we had a very different strategy and in part because the feeding situation was different. Panda was born at 36 weeks, failed his first blood-sugar test, I knew that I didn’t produce very much milk and the first few days of breastfeeding both kids resulted in searing pain on one side, which meant I couldn’t breastfeed for long or sometimes needed to skip a session. As a result, we supplemented Panda with formula while we were still in the hospital. The use of formula immediately meant that, unlike Lion, he never had a period where he was starving and not getting enough to eat through breastfeeding. We were never instructed to wake Panda to eat during the night and as soon as we brought him home from the hospital, he was sleeping six hours a time.

Panda would wake up from time to time during the night, grunting or shifting in his sleep. While with Lion, one of us would rush over to pick him up, give him a pacifier, or give him a bottle, this time we followed “Le Pause” of Bringing Up Bebe, where you observe the baby for a moment or two to see if they are just switching sleep cycles or whether they really do need to be held, fed or changed. Instead of intervening at all, I would simply watch him for a minute or two. Many times, Panda was just making noises in his sleep, or even if his eyes opened briefly, he would quickly fall back asleep without any help. I really wish we had done this with Lion. I never really worked hard on stretching out the time between night feedings, and Panda basically extended the time himself. By one month, he was sleeping eight hours at a time, and then slept eleven hours by about three months.

Sound asleep at just a few days old. He would sleep through the hammering of Mr. Dolphin’s home repairs!

During the day, I was both more and less regimented about Panda’s schedule than we had been with Lion. Panda very naturally fell into a 3 to 3.5 hour interval for feeding and I was very strict on keeping to that schedule. He was so good about it himself, that I insisted that the daycare feed him at 9:30am, 1pm and 4pm, because I was afraid to mess with his predictable schedule. As far as napping went, however, I gave up on any semblance of a schedule and wrote on his activity sheet “does not have a reliable nap schedule; let him nap when he wants, but wake him if he sleeps beyond three hours.” Not only did I stop caring about what time he slept and how many naps he had in a day, but I also didn’t care if he slept more than two hours (three hours, however, was too much I decided). We never would have let Lion slept past two hours. I took the approach of nap whenever and for however long he wanted, unless he stopped sleeping well at night. I suppose after trying the limited nap approach with Lion and failing, I wanted to try the sleep begets sleep theory. The latter approach worked much better for us, at least with Panda: no matter how many naps he took or for how long, Panda reliably slept eleven hours each night.

Panda goes down for the night without the sleep crutches that Lion had (a bottle and pacifier). We put him down fully awake, and he will babble for a bit then fall asleep. Even when he does cry, it’s only for a couple of minutes and then he passes out. Whenever we did let Panda fuss in his bassinet in our room before we moved him in to share a room with Lion, he would almost always put himself back to sleep without requiring any interventions.

We’ve had some sleep regressions with Panda over the last couple of months, but he is still a much better and more reliable sleeper than Lion. They have vastly different personalities and needs, though, and Panda has always been a much easier baby than Lion was. There’s no way of telling whether our different approaches to sleep training have affected their sleep today, but I now fall firmly into the sleep begets sleep camp.