Helping a persistent baby sleep
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| Mon, 03-27-2006 - 10:46am |
There should be an exhausted emoticon!
This question isn't about Sam (6.75, As) it's about his 12 mo. old lil' bro who isn't very good at sleeping and I'm pretty much sick and (literally) tired of it. I thought at least one of you would have some BTDT advice!
Sam did sleep through the night consitently until 5 yo, but he'd sleep until 2 or 3am and go right back to sleep. He had a harder time falling asleep at the start of bedtime though, but outgrew that just fine, thankfully. Now he goes to bed no problem and even has very few night time accidents now *and* sleeps through the night! Yeah!
But Harrison (NT so far) wakes very often, sometimes every hour. He nurses but not always to sleep, he will fall asleep in his crib if someone is in the room, something Sam could never do. But he can't stay asleep and is genuinely pissed off to be awake when he wakes up. By the time we get to bed at 11pm or so, I'm pooped from basically trying to get him to sleep all day. Right now he is in our room until we move next week and he'll have his own room. He ends up in bed with us at some point in the night, which I'm fine with if he slept! But he's waking up all night and I'm rolling back and forth half asleep trying to get comfortable. He will nap ok if I sleep with him on the couch, which I usually need. But I also can't get anything done during the day when he is awake and naps go the same way nighttime goes. I'm lucky if he sleeps 45 min. during the day.
I know gritting my teeth and baring it until he grows out of it will work. But in the meantime I am going insane from lack of sleep and I fear for my family's safety in the middle of the night because I am exhausted and constantly being woken. It's like torture......this is how people are tortured! I get a little crazy at 2am sometimes but I'm not really awake to calm myself down. I'm starting to get depressed about how difficult both my kids are. I just want 4 hours of sleep straight through.......not even a whole night!!! DH is little help, not because he doesn't want to, but because if he tries to help Harrison calm down, Harrison gets more angry that Mom isn't the one attending to him. Plus DH has to get up at the butt crack of dawn and drives around in a truck all day; I don't want him exhausted and getting into an accident.
Any ideas?
Chrystee


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Sleep deprivation is the worst! I feel for you so much.
You don't talk much about a bedtime routine for your youngest. Do have a consistant plan of attack when it comes to bedtime? I see that he doesn't have his own room, which will change soon (presumably when you move), but you could have a very predictable bedtime routine (for example: bathtime, story, nurse and bed) which would set the mood, so to speak. And you can work on that now to have it firmly in place before he gets his own room.
The trick is to get your little one able to put himself not only to sleep at the beginning of the evening, but to be able to put himself back to sleep in the middle of the night when he wakes up (which all people do, just some have a harder time getting back to sleep than others).
There is excellent book titled Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth, which made the most sense to me out of all the books out there (and trust me, with my first child, I read them all--she was such a lousy sleeper when she was a baby). If you haven't read it, I recommend it. It really does make sense and it isn't all about abandoning your kid to cry it out.
Good Luck. The tough part about your baby not sleeping well is that it doesn't happen overnight. But trust me, if you are committed and consistant, it will happen.
Gemma
I went through the same thing with Jacob at about 10-11 months. I was literally getting up every hour and a half. I was exhausted, dead to the world. SO, one night I finally bit the bullet and let him cry it out. He cried for an hour and a half before he fell asleep. Then woke up again in the middle of the night and cried for 45 minutes. We had to put pillows over our ears. I guess he just fell back asleep out of shear exhaustion. The next night he went to bed much easier and woke up once and cried for 10 minutes. The third night he slept straight through.
Jacob has never been much of a napper either. He will nap when he's at the sitter for about 2 hours (if he sleeps on the couch) but at home he will only nap for 50 minutes in his crib. If I lay him on our bed he will sleep longer. But, I agree with Gemma on the healthy child healthy sleep habit book. We have it and it was useful. I would start with a bedtime routine and an earlier bedtime. Jacob goes to bed at 7:30(he's 18 months old) and my 4 year old DD goes to bed at 7:45. In fact, I was super consistent with DD and her sleep times when she was a baby and she has always slept 12 hours at night and still takes a 2 hour nap. I totally feel your pain. Jacob is again starting to have sleep issues. He goes to bed easily, but gets up at 5:00 and screams bloody murder until you get him. it sucks!
hope this helps. But I really think Harrison needs a much earlier bedtime with a soothing night time routine.
good luck
Sonya
We have a routine. He can't bathe every night because of sensitive skin, but we do change into pjs, nurse, rock a little and then into the crib every night.
He goes to bed by 730pm everynight.....it's DH and I that go to bed by 11. Of course sometimes he's up at 830 then 1030 then 12am..........:(
I knew cry it out would come up, which is why I didn't mention what we tried......at night he falls asleep fine even when we let him cry (I say make him cry LOL) But he'll wake up 30 min. later when we do that so I'm up on and off all night with him crying...not helping out much so far.
I've implemented a firm no nurse to sleep policy which isn't helping at all. He won't fall or stay asleep during the day without me or at least nuring to sleep. Consistency during the day is difficult. He wakes at 6am usually. He's ready for a nap at about 930-10am but sometimes he sleeps 30 min. and sometimes (rarely) 1.5 hour. Then I have to leave to get his brother at 2pm and that throws the afternoon nap off. He sometimes falls asleep in the car, but then wakes up when I have to go get older DS. He seems to still need 2 naps but timing them is difficult. He cried for an entire hour today at nap time and I just can't and won't let him cry longer than that. If he can't self soothe and/or fall asleep in that hour of non stop crying then he's not ready. 2 hours of crying is cruel to me and I won't and can't do it. That of course may change in the large apt with his own room :)
Is it ok to think your kids are a pain in the @ss? ;)
I'll check out that book though......thanks
Chrystee
Dear Chrystee,
Now I'm curious. Is his skin sensitive to water every evening or to soap? Because we often let Malcolm soak in warm water at bedtime without any soap, because he really isn't that dirty every night. But the soaking is really good for getting his body ready for sleep. We also do a total body massage with baby oil, he has always loved that. Lot of pressure point stroking. Part of the deal here is to spend a prolonged period of time preparing for sleep, and keeping the routine close to the same, a step-by-step process.
We always read stories for awhile at bedtime and have always done that. I sing 4 or 5 lullabies/silly songs to him every night. His dad has different bedtime routines than me, they make up stories with the stuffed animals .. these days they pretend look for jobs in (any) newspaper for 2 of his stuffed animals that are always arguing (the stuffed animals argue, dad and ds look for the jobs).
I nursed Malcolm for many years, and I did let him fall asleep at the breast. As he weaned from breastfeeding, he still wanted the night-night snack, but then I started cutting him off before he was really asleep ... but he was 3 years old at the time.
We also had a tape of lullabies we would play when he was in bed. After weaning, I would stay in room with lights dimmed, but not hold him or really engage, let him hold a favorite stuffed animal, which he still sleeps with at age 8... Actually, now he holds his stuffed dog and a flannel-covered pillow nicknamed his "sleep pillow".
Why not try a later bedtime? Seems early to me when he isn't staying asleep. Why not even 9 pm, get him real sleepy, spend longer time building nighttime ritual and even include your older child?
BTW, hey, sometimes kids ARE a pain in the @ss...
Good luck, sleep is such a blessed thing when you can get it, isn't it?
yours,
Sara
ilovemalcolm
Well, first of all, I hope this doesn't offend anyone, but I'm going to give my 2 cents about that Marc Weissbluth book. When David was 4 months old, I casually mentioned to a neighbor that he didn't take naps. He'd occasionally fall asleep for ten minutes a couple times a day (until he was about six months old), but I didn't know I was supposed to put him down for a nap. He never seemed sleepy. The neighbor was appalled, and insisted that I read that book. So, I did, and it basically said that at that age, I should be putting him down for a nap "after two hours of wakefulness", or something like that, and that the reason he wasn't taking naps was because the poor thing was too exhausted to sleep. It was time for me to stop abusing my poor child by denying him the naps his little body needed. Okay, so I spent a few months trying desperately to follow Dr. Weissbluth's plan to the letter. Oh, by the way, David always slept through the night. By the time he was a week old, he was sleeping through a good eight hours. So, that was nice, but it was really, REALLY, REALLY hard to get him to fall asleep in the first place. We had a routine, but he just wasn't ready to sleep. Anyway, I remember one day, when I was trying to teach him to take naps. He cried, and cried, and cried, and, like the good Dr. Weissbluth said, I didn't go in to him. After two hours of screaming, I couldn't take it any more. I went in to his room, and he had tears streaming down his face. (So did I, come to think of it!) I gave him a big hug, and I said something to the effect of , "Screw this, let's go play at the park." I dumped that book in the trash, and we went out and had a lovely time playing on a blanket under some trees. I wasted a LOT of time trying to make him take naps, and trying to make him go to sleep at 7pm. It took me AGES to realize that even though a sleep expert insisted that of the thousands of babies he had worked with, they ALL needed to sleep a certain amount of time, MINE did not. Turns out my kid was unusual in a lot of ways. LOL!
So...read the book, and maybe it will be helpful. But don't do like I did, and think that you are a big failure if the ideas don't work. The book talks about recognizing the signs of sleepiness, and I felt like I must be an awful mom, because I couldn't see ANY of the "signs of sleepiness" that I was supposed to be looking for.
As far as being sleep deprived (the parent, not the child), I know where you're coming from. You could be the most level-headed, sweetest person alive, but after enough sleep deprivation, the monster starts to come out. You probably ought to have a few days where your job is to fall asleep on the couch, or whereever you can be near Harrison while he plays, watches a video, or whatever works for you. I know it's hard, but ten minutes here and ten minutes there might make the difference. It's okay to feed people peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner. It's not okay to fall asleep at the wheel of your car, or to let something catch on fire in the toaster oven because you are so tired. Of course, you know that as soon as you close your eyes, something will need your immediate attention. That's a given. And yeah, while you are taking a nap, the laundry and dirty dishes seem to multipy, even when no one uses them. That's something I could never understand! LOL! Still, you've got to take a nap or three.
Oh, since I badmouthed Weissbluth's book...Here is another sleep book that I liked much better, although by the time I read it, a year later, I'd learned to take all parenting advice with a grain of salt.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385192509/sr=8-1/qid=1143497317/ref=sr_1_1/103-8590411-8431062?%5Fencoding=UTF8
Oh, and no staying up until midnight with message boards! ;) That's my big sleep-sucking vice. "MUST READ ONE MORE MESSAGE!"
Evelyn
About the skin, he's got pre-eczema......tiny little bumps all over, always has it, no color on them. I'm watching it and trying to keep him super moist and not exposing him to too much hot or warm water which seems to help. And it really is difficult to find time for a bath every night, but the later bedtime would help with that.....worth a try. We could read stories together with Sam, if Harrison wouldn't try to tear the book up that is.
Sam nurse til almost 2 and I had planned and hope for a little longer with Harrison just because weaning wasn't a great experience for me. I didn't thing nursing to sleep was a big deal at this young age, but Harrison seems to expect it everytime he wakes up which is very often. Sam started biting on purpose every feeding and I couldn't get him to stop. It was painful emotionally and physically so I cut him off cold turkey with very little trouble :( I was surprisingly disappointed in how easy it was.
Thanks for the ideas
Chrystee
Thanks.......I needed to hear that. I feel like I'm trying everything that I can, but this kid just doesn't want to conform! LOL I suppose I shouldn't be surprised since I already have one DS who isn't a cookie-cutter kid!
Chrystee
Haven't read the rest of the posts yet so sorry if I copy something. Just this popped in my head and wanted to type it out before it was lost, lol. Having one of those days.
My friend here has just been going through this with her 15m dd who was also sleeping in the same room. They were holding off putting her in with her sisters until she slept through the night. They have 5 kids and a smaller home so there weren't many options.
The finally at about 12 months put her in the living room in a portacrib at night and she slepts through immmediately. Sometimes when she is sick they bring her back in thier room and she is right up and waking again. It seems she just knows mom and dad are there and just can't sleep through because she wants mom.
Don't know if it would work for you but it worked for her.
Renee
I guess we will find out soon enough.......would be a miracle!!!
Chrystee
THis is sooo tough.
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