Hellobee

My daughter sleeps like she’s in Brisbane, Australia, and by this I mean that her 12 hour sleep stretch starts at 7pm or 8pm in their time zone, which translates to a Pacific Standard Time bedtime of 1 or 2am. Either that, she’s or already sleeping like a teenager. Books say that babies between 3 and 6 months should be in bed between 7pm and 8:30pm, but in the same way my daughter has never visited Australia, she hasn’t read these books either.

The E.A.S.Y. routine from Secrets of the Baby Whisperer starts with E for eat followed by A for activity – be it as simple as a quick burp for a newborn, or tummy time and longer interactions for older babies; just make sure S for sleep comes after activity, and not after eat or surely the world will fall out of orbit! And then if you do it all in the right order, enjoy some well deserved time to yourself. Easier said than done.

I got through the first 4 weeks like anyone does. In a blur. Sleep deprivation was a given. However, at the 6 week point, things were supposed to be getting better. I wasn’t banking on sleeping through the night (which only meant a 5 hour stretch). I just wanted to go to bed. I would get her to sleep with nursing, but as I crawled into bed every night, I was overcome by overwhelming anxiety about her waking up in 20 minutes and remaining awake. At best it would mean 1 hour of walking up and down the hallway in the dark, unbeknownst to my husband who was sound asleep in bed. At worst it would mean 1-2 hours of walking, then throwing in the towel at the 3 hour mark, slumped in a chair with my baby on my chest, super alert and craning her neck around like a skittish, bright eyed bird. In those wee hours, I almost expected her head to spin around, 360°. Oh my little night owl.

P R O P S  &  C R U T C H E S

Every book and article I read warned me to avoid props and crutches. Don’t nurse or rock her to sleep because when she awakens again, she’ll be startled to find herself in a different place than she last remembered. I can fully understand that it could be as alarming as me waking up in the middle of the night to find my pillows and blankets had been removed, and I am lying on the kitchen table. However, my daughter doesn’t have problems with night awakenings — just getting to bed in the first place. Nine out of ten times, her cries do not escalate, and she falls back to sleep on her own in the middle of the night, so I’m not shaming myself for nursing or bouncing her to sleep.

A lot of advice told me to silently rub her tummy to soothe her to sleep, whether it’s bedtime or a nighttime awakening. Don’t even think about picking her up out of the crib! I’ve even seen other moms do it and successfully pacify their children that are crying during the day. This is a no go for my baby. If she has a night awaking, I nurse her. I nurse her till the cows come home.

I S  I T  A C T U A L L Y  A  ” P R O B L E M ” ?

The best advice I’ve read has been that if the way your baby goes to sleep is something that you can happily keep doing, it’s not a problem. Don’t let books or the internet tell you otherwise. If you enjoy burying your nose in your baby’s hair and rocking her to sleep every night, more power to you! If you and your husband are night owls and go to bed at midnight, then a 10pm bedtime for baby really isn’t a problem. Pick your battles right? Waking up several times during the night to tend to the baby means I get to crawl back into my warm bed and cuddle with my husband that many more times. My husband and I are a bit night owlish ourselves, but our baby’s bedtime is two hours too late for even us, and I’d rather not work around it by picking up all the 1pm-9pm shifts when I go back to work. Last week he had to wake up at 4am for work, which meant that when I finally got into bed for good at 2am, he had been in dreamland for so long that he was in some kind of twitchy sleep state that made it difficult for me to cuddle up and fall asleep.

E V A L U A T I N G  T H E  S I T U A T I O N

One popular way of pushing back the bedtime is to do it slowly, by 15 minutes every day, or even every few days. But her bedtime seems to hover anywhere between 12:30am on a good night, to 2:30am on a bad night, and sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to it. They say develop a routine – that you don’t have to do everything exactly on schedule, but do stick to the same order. I’ve tried routines, but I’ve found that if she hasn’t gotten in her third nap of the day, putting her to bed at 12:30am constitutes her third nap and she’s up around 1am and stays awake for another hour. So I’ve tried to evaluate my situation and come to my baby’s personal sleep truths:

1. Ideal “awake” time is 1-2 hours. I try to be cognizant of the two hour mark, but the last few days I’ve been watching her more closely and multitasking less, and I’ve noticed that she starts hitting her eyes with her hands only one hour after she’s “woken up for the day” at 1pm. When I’m not paying attention, I usually just time her first nap to the 2 hour window and start to try and get her to go to bed at about 3pm, but then she doesn’t get to sleep till 4pm, because she’s overtired and needed to go down at 2pm in the first place.
2. Watch for sleepy cues. Rubbing her eyes, hitting her face, yawning, turning her face away or burying her face in my chest, flailing arms and legs.
3. She needs three naps. The farther the last nap gets away from us, the farther she pushes her bedtime toward the 3am mark.
4. After a nap, she needs at least 1 hour of awake time to even think about falling asleep again. If her last nap strikes at 12:30am, and she wakes up at 1am, she can’t physically go back to bed until 2am.

It’s not fail proof, though. Yesterday she got all three of her naps in, and so I gleefully put her to “bed” at 11:15pm and then she was up at 12:05am, 1:15am, and 1:45am.

S E C R E T S  O F  T H E  BA B Y  W H I S P E R E R

According to Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, there are three stages of falling asleep in a 20 minute time frame:

• Stage 1: The Window: Sleepy cues. If you miss the third yawn, she won’t be able to transition to the next stage.
• Stage 2: The Zone: Baby has “the seven mile stare” – a fixed gaze, staring off at the nothingness.
• Stage 3: Letting go: Nodding off. Eyes droop and head drops forward or to the side, just as sleep seems to come, eyes open suddenly and head whips back , jolting the whole body. This may repeat 3-5 times.

I was very aware of “the window” and “the zone” – everyone can tell when my baby is doing the seven mile stare. But then, as droopy as her eyes are, as soon as we put her into her bed a) her eyes brighten up and she gets excited to see us or b) soon after she goes down her arms will start to flail into her face and within a minute wake herself up with this unpleasant feeling. Swaddling could only do so much, and after a few moments it wasn’t only her hands waking her up, but the swaddle over her face, too. My father started to just hold her arms down until she fell asleep.

M E R L I N ‘ S  M A G I C  S L E E P  S U I T

Then it clicked. During one of my long nights, I had remembered reading about Merlin’s Magic Sleep Suit on Hellobee. I remembered it either worked quite literally like magic or didn’t work at all. And holding my baby’s arms down at 2am myself, I realized, this will work for my baby. So I bought one. And it worked. Like magic. And during the day, her typical 20 minute naps became 1-2 hour naps in the suit. The only way I could get that stretch of time for nap in the past 4 months was to wear her during the day. Shortly after I starting using it, I decided it needed a wash, and I put her back in a regular sleep sack for the night. After 3 awakenings I bought another one at 3am.

The Merlin Sleepsuit is great when I nurse her to sleep and she stays asleep as she’s transferred to bed. But I’ve spent too many nights lately re-nursing her 3 to 4 more times, only to have her still awake and crying about being put to bed. Or she will wake up 20 minutes later. Four times in a row. Almost like, “Come on mom, it’s only midnight. Don’t you know I go to bed at 2?” So the magic suit needs a bit of extra magic some nights, especially with what I can only fathom to be teething crankiness.

T H E  N O – C R Y  S L E E P  S O L U T I O N

So, to another book I go. The take home message from The No-Cry Sleep Solution is to make logs of naps, pre-bedtime routines, and night-wakings over 10 days, then soberly analyze what worked, what didn’t work, what changed, and what you were unable execute. I have yet to sit down with a pen and paper, but I loved the book’s explanation of a baby’s night time sleep cycle:

• Drowsy; falling asleep
• Light sleep
• Deep sleep for about an hour
• Brief awakening
• Deep sleep for about 1-2 hours
• Light sleep
• Brief awakening
• REM; dreaming sleep
• Brief awakening
• Light sleep
• Brief awakening
• REM
• Brief awakening
• Toward morning: another period of deep sleep
• Brief awakening
• REM
• Brief awakening
• Light sleep
• Awake for the day

What I found most interesting is the concept of “brief awakenings.” Like I mentioned earlier, my daughter would only nap for about 20 minutes on her own in her crib (how she managed to sleep through the night was beyond me) and then she’d wake up. If I had her in a carrier, I would notice her start to stir at about the 20 minute mark, and even open her eyes, but I could bounce her back to sleep and get a 1-3 hour nap this way. The book recommends putting the baby down for a nap and setting a timer for 10 minutes before she would typically awaken and staying close by. Then when the baby makes a noise, you can catch her in a sleepy about-to-wake-up state and help her go back to sleep with a pacifier, rocking, nursing, or whatever you typically do. After a week or so of this, the naps will become longer.

C I O  V S .  N O T  C I O

There are a lot of hormones surging through our body after birth to help us respond to and nurture our baby. I remember the overwhelming urge to get to my crying baby ASAP. The sound of my baby crying during those first few months tugged at my inmost being, and was enough to make me jump out of the shower with shampoo in my hair. After the 3 month mark, that feeling began to wane and I could comfortably wait and listen to see if her crying would subside. It’s perhaps the one “textbook” thing I’ve done right so far, to observe. To resist the urge to intervene or “rescue.” In the first three months, we respond to cries, but after that, responding too quickly is no longer a response, it is a rescue. 

The flip side to that is no rescue — little to no response. Sure there’s the “cry it out” and all the variations of it – return to the room in 10 minutes intervals and pat the stomach, and increase those intervals each day aka “Ferberizing.” Night owl problems? I picked up the book The moms on call guide to basic baby care : the first 6 months. The basic premise is that if the baby’s bedtime is 1am, don’t worry about setting it back incrementally. Put the baby down at your ideal time, turn on white noise loud enough that you can hear it from the other side of a closed door, and let them cry it out. And with three days of sticking to this, you will succeed. I think I still have enough oxytocin surging through my body that I personally wouldn’t be able to embrace this idea.

With my return to work looming and ever imminent though, I need to be making more of an effort to get that bedtime to something more manageable. Maybe I need to combine a 15 minute earlier bedtime with a 15 minute earlier wake up each day.

What have you done for your little night owls?