Jace has had difficulty sleeping in the past month. Which means, so have his parents. Great timing to be off your sleep schedule, at the end of the semester. Well, we've been having a lot of fun trying to figure out what is wrong and how to help. It began probably about the second week of November. Jace had been getting pretty good sleep, only waking up twice every night for a feeding. He'd go to bed between 9 and 10 and be up around 8. Life was pretty good.
Well, things were going well, we were still figuring out his naps and I noticed he was always really cranky in the evenings. So I figured that meant he needed an earlier bedtime. So we started putting him to bed at 8, then 7. And his night time wakings increased to once every hour from 2 until morning. He also added one about an hour after he fell asleep. He had to be nursed every time to go to sleep and it was driving me crazy. He was getting more nursings at night than during the day! I decided something had to be done, because I couldn't stand not sleeping anymore.
We knew Jace could go to sleep pretty well on his own, since I could put him down in his crib still awake most nights and he would fall asleep without complaint in a few minutes. So the problem was not getting to sleep. The only sleep solution I could think of up to this point was the crying it out solution, which Rod couldn't stand cause he hated to hear Jace cry, and which wouldn't solve our problems, because it only seems to apply to the first laying down at night, and he could do that.
So, on the suggestion of a friend, we went to the library and got two books. In the first, it suggested that if they were waking for many feedings at night, they were getting accustomed to getting their food at night instead of during the day, so feed them more during the day. This I implemented immediately. It made sense, because I thought Jace was done feeding, but he'd often be cranky after a feeding. He was still hungry, so he ended up waking up a lot to get food at night, since he wasn't during the day. That eliminated some of the night time wakeups. It was so successful the first night, I thought we had solved our problems. I was wrong.
In the second book,
Solve your Child's Sleep Problems, by Dr. Richard Ferber. In this book, it suggests a progressive waiting approach, which is somewhat similar to the crying it out solution, but you can go soothe the child after increasing increments of minutes, so long as you don't pick them up. The point of this is to reassure them that you are there, but for you to be out of the room when they do fall asleep. Then they are learning to soothe themselves and associating sleeping with something they can do on their own, without mommy or daddy in the room. When they wake up at night, then things will be under the same conditions as they were when they fell asleep, so they won't need to be soothed to sleep again, they can just fall asleep again on their own.
We tried this for a week. This was successful in eliminating many of his unnecessary wakings and when he did, he was often able to fall asleep again before we got up to soothe him. If he didn't fall asleep before we soothed him, he would fall asleep as soon as we went to him and gave him his plugger. But it also meant that we had to listen to increasing amounts of crying every night. It got so wearing on the nerves that I couldn't stand to hear him cry at all. I would do anything just to get him to stop crying, because I couldn't stand to hear him cry anymore. I missed my happy baby!
Well, the book professed to show results using this method within a couple of days. We weren't getting the results that it promised. So, something had to change. Well, I'd only read one chapter of the book by Dr Ferber, so I decided to read some more to see what we were doing wrong. At this point, Rod was of the firm belief that this book should be destroyed. I read more anyway, and realized that there was more than one solution offered in this book. Another chapter discussed circadian rhythms and natural times of sleepiness and wakefulness. I read this chapter and wanted to slap myself so hard. Jace fell into the pattern of going to bed on his own around 9 just about since he was born. He was ready to sleep at that time. When I moved the time back to 7, I was putting him to bed before he was sleepy and then he'd have to spend all night in bed, from 7 pm to 7 am. 12 hours is a long time to be in bed even for a baby. No wonder he was having a hard time sleeping. He was not needing to sleep that long. So, we shifted his bedtime to 8 so that he still went to bed when he was sleepy and before he got cranky and added a naptime between 4 and 5 in the evening. This way, he gets 4 hours of naps during the day, one 2 hour, and then 2 one hour naps. Then at night, he goes to bed when he is ready for bed, usually around 8, and he sleeps until around midnight for his first feeding and then about 5 for his second feeding. Then he wakes up at 7, so he sleeps for about 11 hours at night. He still wakes up twice a night, but this is MUCH more tolerable than what we had before! If the feedings don't go away on their own in a month or so, we'll start weeding them out, but for now, I'm fine with this. I feel pretty confident that this is a solution, because we started this last Monday, and he's been sleeping like this for the past week. Oh, to sleep again!
