I hate to speak too soon but I just have to write down somewhere that we have had some sleep progess at our house. As you might recall, our boy was waking up consistently at the 45 minute mark after falling asleep. Seriously, we’d get up with him 14 times in a night before he decides somewhere between 5 and 6 am that he is up for the day. Now, his awake time at night has dropped significantly. It used to be up to an hour and a half. Now the worst case scenario is probably 20 minutes. But still, 14 times of 20 minute pops over night is more than 4 and a half hours which means that our boy was sleeping less than 6 hours a night. Add that to his two forty-five minute naps in a day and our boy was maybe approaching 7.5 hours of sleep a day. Now, I can go without sleep. It wasn’t until this past weekend (so almost 4 weeks of being a mom) where I was having trouble finding words when I was explaining something. But I was really worried about our boy. Babies his age are supposed to sleep 14-16 hours and that significantly helps their growth and development. If he’s down to just 7ish hours, how is that hurting him?
We’ve tried everything. I could write a darn funny post about our attempts at getting our boy to sleep for longer than 45 minute stretches but I’ll spare you. What I will say is that this weekend, after I put a healthy dent into The Happiest Baby on the Block and after observing that his arms were a significant part of the problem in his waking (he pinwheels the heck out of them while he sleeps, knocks himself in the face, and then wakes up mad at whoever punched him), we busted out the kiddopatamus swaddle. We had tried swaddling him in Ethiopia but he always busted out of the swaddle and seemed so mad about it. Recently, we bought 2 new swaddles that were bigger for our now 18 pounds (yep, he gained 2 pounds in 17 days) of joy and we used them on Sunday and Monday night with some success. Our little guy is now sleeping somewhere between 90 minutes and 120 minutes at a pop and so that has reduced his wake ups to 6 or 7 a night. And, lo and behold, he is indeed the happiest baby on the block with all that sleep in his system (truth be told, he was pretty happy before the sleep, too, but he did have his overtired breakdowns. We haven’t seen an overtired breakdown since Sunday which is like lightyears ago). Today, he even napped for two hours in his swaddle.
Our other sleep solutions are an ocean sound machine (love it!), a vaporizer, and a little feeding and belly rocking when he wakes up at night. With all that in place, we’re coming closer to 5 to 10 minute wake-ups when he does wake up.
PS: you’ll be glad to know that he’s moved out of his Moses basket and sleeps in his crib now. I’ll sneak crib shots of him soon!
I’ll keep you posted on our progress!
SO PRECIOUS!!!!!