No, no – not sleep training.  Sleep train, as in “getting on the sleep train’.  ‘Cause that’s what I’m trying to do with Daphne, get her on the sleep train.

Kate came over yesterday.  I’m sad that it was our last visit, but I hope I’ll see her again in the future.  (It’s one of those things where you start out with a professional relationship, and hope you can be friends.  That’s always a funky transition in life, I think,  Happens in the yoga studio sometimes too, and it seems like “delicate” water to tread, but not for any particularly good reason.) But it was good to catch up and get some more very helpful advice.

We talked about general things – how breastfeeding is going and how she’s developing – but a lot of it was talking about sleep.  Like most veteran parents, she was shocked that Daphne was only getting 11 to 12 hours of sleep a day.  She needs closer to 15.  Even though a few babies can go so little sleep in a day, really, it just tends to make them wired and cranky.  (This will be item one on my future post “Forget the Pooping: Important Things They REALLY Never Tell You”. :P)  Daphne was doing a great job of demonstrating the issue and fighting sleep through the yawns and eye rubs while Kate was here.

I’m sure that if Kate had a dollar for every time she told a new parent to swaddle, she’d be a millionaire, and she did indeed tell me to swaddle her.  (She probably also wondered why the heck we weren’t doing it in the first place.  It’s not like the concept was new to us at this point.  But I’m sure we’re not the first thick-headed parents she’s had to deal with. 🙂 Stubborn runs both ways (I’m still breastfeeding, but had mostly given up on the swaddling).  So, Kate swaddled her, and held her sideways and bounced her (really, the gentle head jiggle seemed to be the important part of the bounce), and saw that calmed her.  But she was staying quite awake.  She tried the pacifier, at which point I learned another “Important Things They REALLY Never Tell You”, a baby has to learn how to use a pacifier.  (Sure, sucking is instinctual, but sucking something like a pacifier and holding onto it is NOT!)  She still demonstrated herself to not be a big pacifier girl, but made use of it for a little bit.

(Sidebar: This brings me to my third “ITTRNTY” (and that is a horrid acronym) – regardless of your feelings on pacifiers (I’m not a big fan, but not stringently against them), it’s worth introducing a baby to them at the appropriate age, because you never know when you may need to make use of the calming aspects of sucking when a boob isn’t around.  And the first time you NEED it is going to be an awful time to teach it.)

When the basic approach didn’t work, we tried putting Daphne, swaddled, in her swing.  She kept spitting out the pacifier, but wasn’t all that fussy during this process.  Over the next half hour, however, she did a lovely demonstration of what she does best – close her eyes and snooze for a few minutes, then open her eyes and just look around.  It’s nice and calm and all, but it does not get her good, needed sleep.

Eventually, we took her into the bedroom, where we have curtains over our blinds to make it quite dark, and put her in a bouncy seat that has vibration.  (To make it easier, we put the seat in the cosleeper, so she wasn’t on the floor.)  The sound machine we have is also in the cosleeper, so when the vibrachair (I love that word) wasn’t quite enough, we turned out the sound as well (ocean waves).  Eventually, with another 10 or 15 minutes of teasing, she went to sleep.  She was fine with our talking, but all the other sensory input had been too much to give up.

She then slept for nearly three and a half hours!

In the end, I did take advantage of one of her waking spells where she might have gone back to sleep and got her up to nurse.  It had been four and a half hours in the middle of the day (when she usually goes two and a half hours) since her last feeding. In the end, she slept yesterday morning for 6hr, 35min overnight (waking once in the middle to eat) until she woke up at 8am, and then napped from 9:15-10:15am, 11:25-12:30pm, 2:30-5:50pm, and 7:30-8:45pm.  (The last two naps were after this work with Kate.)

Jason, and to a lesser extent I as well, was worried about the extra sleeping during the day keeping her up at night.  He was  quite worried we’d have another six hour fussy stint, though clearly willing to try this sleep experiment.  And while I know that all experienced parents will note that it’s a silly concern, I think we had to experience it to believe it.  And experience it we did.

Last night, she slept from 9:50pm to 8:25am, waking up once to eat.  She did take a little longer than usual to get back to sleep during that waking (40 minutes), but I think it was as much because she was gassy as anything else.  So far today, she’s also had a morning nap (9:25-11:20am), two short afternoon naps that were less than ideal car ride naps (12:55-1:25pm, 2:30-2:55pm), and is currently taking her early evening nap which started at 4pm.

That’s 15hr, 20min last night, and we’re on 10hr, 55min so far today, with seven hours left in the day and some less than stellar napping during the afternoon.

I kind of feel like the vast majority of the day is spent either nursing her, getting her to go to sleep, or waiting for her while she sleeps.  (She’s sleeping in a seat or swing of some variety at the moment, so I don’t feel comfortable leaving her with a monitor on and walking away.)  But if that’s what it takes to teach her how to sleep, I’ll do it.  As Kate said, pick the crutches you can live with, you can get rid of them when you don’t need them any more.  Bouncing her on a ball is as much a crutch as the swing, but we’ll take what works at the moment.

Interestingly enough, and I was wondering if this would happen, so far, the breastfeeding has not been as painful.  I’ve been concerned about the frequency of feeding, since she’s sleeping so much.  She normally nurses seven to eight times a day, and has been growing quite well with that.  But yesterday she only nursed six times, and today has been four so far, and I expect she may nurse twice more today.  She’s not acting hungry except right before she eats, and she’s nursing almost every time she wakes up, so I don’t think there is a problem, but it’s a little disconcerting not knowing how much she’s getting.  (I strongly suspect that, though she’s not nursing for any longer, she’s being a little less lackadaisical about the whole thing and getting more in the same amount of time.  Perhaps that’s just my optimism, but I’ll stick with it.)  Ironically, so far, since this experiment began, nursing has not been as painful as it previously was.  I don’t have enough data to be sure this isn’t a coincidence, but I remain hopeful.

She’s still fighting her naps, and though I’m not picking her up and doing anything with her, I’m sticking around to help make the environment work for her as best I can.  I’m certainly not a cry-it-out parent (particularly not for an eight week old, who can’t really learn how to self-soothe just yet), but there’s something to be said for me giving her the space to fall back to sleep on her own in the middle of a nap, rather than disturbing her even more.

At the end of the day, I’m managing it as an input threshold problem.  She’s getting input from a number of sources – visual, oral, aural, tactile, olfactory, proprioceptive.  If I can minimize the unique input of these sources, by either eliminating input or masking them with rhythmic “noise” (the bouncing, the sucking, the sound machine), then she’s got the lowest input state, and she can let her body listen to the sleep cues, rather than trying to get her brain to override them.  If I think about it that way, really, it becomes a lot easier of a problem to manage.

Hopefully, we’ll continue to manage it well, and perhaps in a few weeks, she’ll even learn not to fight sleep quite so hard. 🙂