Sleep Update #73

I feel like I’ve written more posts about Chloe’s sleep habits, or lack thereof, more than anything over the last 16 months.  I suppose it makes sense, since she’s spent about half her life sleeping at this point, but I’m still waiting for the day when I don’t have to worry or think about it so much!!

We made it through yet another rough patch and now I think we’re at the best spot we’ve ever been in terms of Chloe’s sleep.  But, whether I want to or not, I can’t help but compare Chloe’s habits with other children her age and Google is always “helpful” in finding out what we should be experiencing.  According to the information I found, Chloe should be getting 13.75 hours of sleep per day – 11.25 overnight and 2 naps totalling 2.5 hours.  Some days this seems pretty darn close to what she does.  Typically we put her down at 7:30PM and she wakes up about 6:30AM, so she’s getting about 11 hours overnight.  She takes a 1 hour nap in the morning and a 1.5-2 hour nap in the afternoon.

But….(you had to know that was coming!) there are many nights when we put her down at 7:30, but at 8PM we can still see her rolling around and hear her talking to herself in her crib, so she’s not actually asleep until after 8PM**.  And almost every night she wakes up at least once, usually more, crying.  Generally the crying only lasts a few seconds, and then she’s out again, but it’s still enough to wake us up and doesn’t lead me to believe that she’s getting very restful sleep.  Then there are times like last Sunday night when she cries for 30 seconds or so, is quiet for a couple minutes, cries for another minute or so, is quiet, etc… for an hour or more.  That’s rough on everyone.

A couple of times a week during her afternoon nap, she wakes up after a half hour, but if we let her cry for 5-10 minutes (the sad, whimpery cry) then she’ll go back to sleep for another 1-1.5 hours, so I know she needs the sleep.  Other times she sleeps for over 2 hours straight through without a peep.  And there are a days when her total nap time tops 3.5 hours after 11 hours at night.

I just wish I had all the answers.  Why is she still waking up crying??  How much napping is too much napping??  Will there ever be a night when I can sleep all night through without hearing her and wondering what’s wrong??

**It’s 8:20 as I finish this post and I can see Chloe rolling around on the monitor and I just saw her beady little eyes on the night vision.  I suppose I should be thankful that she’s not crying…

Sleep, sleep – hooray!!

I’m fully aware that I’m probably about to jinx us here, but I can’t help it.  I have to share!!  After a year of struggling, Chloe Mae is starting to sleep through the night. 

I think our struggles have been a combination of her temprament, some mistakes made by us as parents and bad luck – colic, teething, 6 ear infections in 5 months, colds, etc…  At her 1-year check-up, we asked the Dr. what we could do to help her sleep better.  We told her that we were putting Chloe down in her crib still awake at bedtime, that when we went in in the middle of the night, we didn’t pick her up and she hadn’t been getting bottles overnight for months.  The doctor’s advice: “Well, it sounds like you’re just going to have to let her cry.”

*sigh*  I kind of knew that’s what we’d hear, but I was hoping for an easier answer.  We decided to wait a few weeks before we tried anything, because Chloe was getting tubes and we wanted to get her through that before we traumatized her (and ourselves.)  We were also hoping that maybe the constant ear pressure was one of the reasons she was waking up.  In the meantime, we were trying to pay attention to why/what might be waking her up so we could try to fix it. 

We know she can find her pacifier and put it back in when she’s sleeping, but sometimes it would fall out onto the floor.  We also noticed that when we went in in the middle of the night, sometimes she’d have her pacifier and Monty, her monkey blanket, but she’d have a leg stuck through the slats of her crib.  So we put her crib bumper back in.  The very first night we did that, she slept from 8PM until 5:45AM.  For us, that was a vast improvement, so we deemed it a success!! 

She’d been doing pretty good sleeping until 4AM (which was still better for us) or later, but after that we were up several times with her before we finally gave up and got up with her at 6AM.  I’d read some articles that said that putting your child to bed later could acutally cause them to get up earlier, because it messes with their sleep cycles.  So we moved her bedtime up by 15 minutes, from 8PM to 7:45PM.  We did this 2 nights ago and for the last 2 mornings we haven’t heard the tell-tale crib-banging until 6:30AM.

We’ve decided that we’re happy with the sleep improvements that Chloe Mae has made over the last few weeks, so we’re not going to push her right now.  Last night she woke up around 4AM, but was just barely fussing kind of off and on, so we let her be and she did fall back asleep on her own.  If she wakes up occasionally though, and is really upset, we’ll still head in and make sure she’s comfy and help her back to sleep – for now.  (We’re going out of town 2 weekends in a row at the end of this month, so we’re not going to worry about it much before then.)

A month or two from now, I might be complaining that she still wakes up, but we’ll deal with that when, or if, the time comes.

Our Daughter Sleepstands

Is “sleepstand” a word??  Probably not, but that’s what she does!!  Several nights recently we’ve had this happen… 

We put Chloe Mae to bed and head downstairs to watch some TV.  We have a video monitor, but we usually don’t pay much attention to the picture when we’re downstairs, we just have the sound on quietly and can hear if she’s crying.  But a few times recently some movement has caught my eye about 20-30 minutes after we put her down.  I’ll glance at the monitor and see that Chloe is standing up in her crib.  So we go upstairs to lay her back down (because she can’t seem to figure out how to get herself back down when she’s sleepy) and find her with her head laying on the crib rail, completely asleep.  And she wasn’t  making any noise before she stood up, so we can only assume that she’s doing this in her sleep!!

If I didn’t think a flash in her dark room would not only wake her up, but also make her angry, I’d take a picture of this adorable sight.  Instead, you’ll just have to take my word on it that it’s cute!!

Finally, a cure!!

I discovered just the thing for this sleep-deprived mama* today!!  It’s called:

It’s a little bakery in Campustown that serves delicious treats infused with pharmaceutical grade caffeine.  Aaron and I split a chocolate chip bar that had 200mg of caffeine in it.  For comparison, a soda averages 35 mg and a cup of coffee averages about 75 mg.  So for this non-soda, non-coffee drinker, the 100mg of caffeine kept me alert all afternoon.

Just what this lady needed on a Monday afternoon!!

*In Chloe’s defense, she’s been doing great at sleeping the last few nights.  But since I haven’t slept well since before I was pregnant, I have a lot of catching up to do!!

Sleep Deprived Mama

Chloe has never been a great sleeper.  I can’t say I don’t deserve this – my mom tells me I didn’t sleep through the night until I was 4.  I can only hope that that’s not what we’re facing!!   There are nights when we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, where we think that maybe, just maybe, she might be figuring out this whole sleep thing.  Then, inevitably, she gets a cold, starts teething, we stay out past her bedtime, she figures out how to crawl, bedtime changes because of daylight savings….something happens that messes with her sleep.

This week it’s a cold/ear infection/teething.  We’re up many, many times a night.  I’m lucky to have a wonderful husband who gets up many of the many, many times.  But….I’m still exhausted and usually half asleep and zombie-like when I go in to get  Chloe back to sleep.

At about 4AM last night she was crying, so in I went.  As I got into her room, I couldn’t figure out where she was!!  Common sense would suggest that since I could hear her screaming I’d know she was there.  She can’t pull herself up to standing, let alone climb out of her crib, so, again, you’d think I’d know she was there.  But it was the middle of the night and I was half asleep, so I couldn’t find my screaming baby curled up in the corner of her crib.

I’m sure it was really only about 2 seconds before I spotted her, but considering that I knew she had to be within about 8 square feet, I felt pretty silly that it took me that long even.  In my sleep-deprived defense, she normally scoots down to the bottom of her crib and instead had moved up to the top….

Okay, it’s still pretty sad.  I think we all just need a good night’s sleep!!

4 weeks!!

I can’t believe she’s 4 weeks old already, but I also can’t remember life before her (that might just be because of sleep deprivation though :-P)  She’s definitely getting bigger.  As you can see, she’s bigger than her monkey now.

"Me & My Monkey" on my birthday!!

"Me & My Monkey" at 4 weeks

 We’re still getting everything figured out.  She’s colicky, and although deep down we realize only time will totally fix it, we’re still trying to find something that will help her feel better.  When she’s not crying, we’ve noticed that she has a more character in her facial expressions.  We definitely see her eyes a lot more than we did at first – and they’re gorgeous!!  We’ve started trying a little tummy time, but I don’t know that I’ve timed it right for her, so we’re still working on it. 

Our “project” for the next few weeks is to try to go longer than 2 hours between nighttime feedings and have her sleeping in her crib (and not on us) in between feedings.  Wish us luck!!

Bottle Warmers are amazing!

When Chloe was 12 days old, someone asked me what the best baby product we had was.  At the time, I didn’t have a great answer.  We had some things we really liked – the boppy pillow is great for feedings and for propping her up to sit and the SwaddleMe blankets are great for helping her sleep at night.    Then a few days later we purchased a bottle warmer to help DaddyMort out with his nighttime feeding.  See, I’m a lucky girl and my husband has encouraged me to pump so that he can give her 1 bottle overnight, allowing me to sleep for more than 2 hours in a row!!  The problem was, that by the time he heated up the water and then heated up the bottle in the warm water, Chloe would be screaming, which wasn’t fun for her or him and it sort of defeated the purpose, because I’d be wide awake by that point.  So, we got this:

It has a cooler section on the back that can fit 2 bottles and vials on the side for measuring the water needed to heat the bottle.  With these features, we never even have to leave her room to heat a bottle and it’s ready in about a minute – about the time it takes to change a diaper!!

We caved!!

And Chloe laughed at us!!  (Well, not really, but she might as well have…)

At 4:15 AM, we had been trying everything we could think of to calm Miss Chloe Mae down for over an hour, with no luck.  So we decided to try a car ride, because previous car rides have had her out cold within a block.  We tried to pick a route that was free of stop signs/lights, with DaddyMort driving and me riding in the back to keep an eye on Chloe.  After 15 minutes of driving, we pulled into the driveway with her still WIDE AWAKE.

*sigh*  At least it was a weekend and we were able to sleep a little later…

3 hours – IN A ROW

I got 3 hours of sleep in a row last night.  I attribute it to an amazing husband, a cooperative daughter and a trip to the doctor’s office.

BabyMort was still looking jaundiced to us and she was eating every 1.5 hours or less, but falling asleep shortly into the feedings (and I’d read that being really sleepy can be a symptom of jaundice.)  So we went in to the doctor’s office yesterday.  We found out that her bilirubin level was 13 – and 14 is the level where they’d consider treatment.  It’s all indirect, which means that her liver is working just fine and she has breastfeeding jaunice.  That’s when a protein in  the breastmilk prevents her body from getting rid of the bilirubin because it’s reabsorbed in the small intestine.  Her levels should remain stable and then drop off in a couple weeks.  This information didn’t help me get any more sleep, but I did feel better knowing what was going on with her jaundice. 

The sleep came, because the pediatrician suggested that we try using a pacifier if it hadn’t been long since her last feeding, because she might just want to suck on something.  We’d been trying to avoid using one, at least until we knew breastfeeding had been well established.  Considering that the little lady had gained 14 ounces in 7 days, the doctor was confident that she had gotten the hang of breastfeeding though.  So when she started rooting around about an hour after her bedtime feeding, DaddyMort grabbed a pacifier and cuddled and rocked her until she fell asleep.  She made it 2.5 hours until her next feeding at that point and then 3.5 hours until the next feeding – with some more cuddling from her daddy!!  He actually apologized when he brought her in after “only” 3.5 hours – I was ecstatic though and definitely more energized to make it through the rest of the night.

We’re optimistic, but not terribly confident, that we might be getting this sleep thing figured out.  Regardless, she’s uber-cute!!

27 days?!?

I should remove the ticker on the side, because when I see how many days are left, I’m always shocked!!  We’ve finished our childbirth classes and the breastfeeding class.  Although I’m fully aware that there’s still plenty we don’t know and plenty we’ll have to figure out specific to BabyMort, but I feel like we’re as intellectually prepared as we can be.  We have her nursery and all her ‘stuff’ ready to go – Aaron even cleaned out the car and installed the car seat over the weekend.  I’ve been on Craigslist like crazy and we’re planning on going to garage sales over the weekend to try to get a few last big things – a stroller, swing and pack & play.

My heartburn has been a lot worse for the past week or so.  I’m also having more trouble sleeping, but luckily I can take naps during the day now!!  I start my weekly doctor’s appointments on Thursday.  I’m looking forward to this week’s so I can find out how she’s ‘hanging out.’  I feel like she’s sitting really low and sometimes it feels like she’s laying sideways, because I think I can feel her head on one side and her butt on the other.  I don’t have anything to back that up though…

At the end of this week, BabyMort will be considered full term.  She’s losing all the fine hair that’s covering her body and is gaining about an ounce a day now.  She doesn’t seem to appreciate it when I use my belly as a shelf – for a plate, a book, or even my arms.  She gets extra squirmy when I do.

36 weeks