Small Good Things

1. The other night, when it was obscenely hot and Tiny Boy had finally moved past his 30 minute sleep hurdle, I went out on the porch with a glass of wine and a book of poems and a notebook, and I wasn't a mother anymore but a self I remembered from a long time ago.
2. And then I went in the house and kissed my sleeping daughter and sleeping son and closed the windows and fell asleep a contended mother of two.
3. Yesterday LG and I made strawberry shortcake.  Tiny Boy was not particularly pleased with the hand mixer being on long enough to make the whipped cream (thanks, LG!), but it sure was yummy.
4. I bought purple mary janes from zappos, because the red sandals I wear everyday are getting tired.  Someone please tell me why I have purchased gametes on the internet but not shoes?  I must do that again.
5. The boy is asleep.  Which means I have roughly another 20 minutes in which to do something around the house. 

Progress?

Tiny Boy slept in his crib last night.  ALL NIGHT.  No, that doesn't mean he slept "through the night."  But every time he woke, I put him back in the crib.  Just rolled him onto his belly and patted his back a couple times as he settled.  That was really amazing and unexpected.

But, of course what that means for me, initially, is a bigger disruption, as I have to stay awake enough to nurse him and move him and then fall back to sleep.  But we both sleep SO much better without a bed companion.

For the record, my goal is NOT night-weaning.  It's (1) both of us getting better/more sleep, (2) teaching him to fall asleep on his own, and (3) moving him to the crib, for at least naps and part of the night.  If night weaning happens as a result, marvelous.  If it doesn't, but he's not waking more than every 2-3 hours, I'm really okay with that, at least for the time being.  Having had a child who needed to eat through the night, until she was two (she didn't eat much in the way of solids, due to food allergies), I really don't find the rush to cut all night feedings a priority.  I certainly don't want to be a human pacifier, but that's not the same thing as a couple regularly timed feedings.

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So instead of the all night suckathon, we seem to be experiencing the all day suckathon.  Clearly he was getting a good chunk of his daily calories at night.  I woke up engorged this morning, and he's been nursing so frequently I've got that oxytocin-drunk feeling.  Would be good if he could eat more FOOD but he really doesn't care for baby food purees and he doesn't know what to do with table food.  Generally, pieces of food go in his mouth and fall back out.  But we can't tackle everything at once.

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The crying thing really isn't getting easier.  He doesn't cry any less.  And, actually, last night he cried even longer than usual.  And he still wakes after 20-30 minutes for the first waking.  Yesterday, after a really horrible morning nap, when he woke from his afternoon nap after 40 minutes but sobbing, I lay down with him and let him nurse and he fell back to sleep for another 1.5 hours.  We both needed that. 

Clearly he's ready to sleep in the crib.  But how to get him to fall asleep easily?  Well, that remains to be seen.

CIO Night 3

I promise I'll stop soon.  These are mostly for my record keeping.

So all day yesterday Tiny Boy cried for 20 minutes and then woke after 30 (and actually during afternoon nap, it was only 17).  After all these initial wake-ups, I check up on him to make sure everything's okay, pick him up, kiss him, say my mantra, and put him back down.  I bailed after another 10 minutes of crying on the morning nap and we went about our day, hoping to get an afternoon nap at the right time.  The afternoon was the first 17 minutes (which doesn't count for anything) and then, after a full 20 minutes of crying, another 40.  So not better than it used to be, and frankly, I was getting better naps out of him most days though it took significant intervention on my part (like nursing, rocking for up to 30 minutes) then laying with him in the bed, nursing after 30 minutes, etc.  I'll give it a few more days, as the first day of CIO I did get 1.5 hrs out of him without any interruptions.

Night seemed slightly better.  Put him down at 7:10; asleep by 7:30.  Awake at 8:00.  Asleep at 8:10.  Awake at ~10:45?  I nursed him, put him back in the crib.  He fussed for a minute and then was out.  Awake at 1:00.  Nursed and let him stay in my bed.  He woke close to every hour, but didn't constantly nurse.  When he was obviously rolling around and having a hard time, I put him back in the crib at 5:00.  He was back in my bed an hour later and awake for the day by 6:30.

So this seems like minimal improvement.  The first half of the night is pretty much what it always was, only he's not in my bed when I go to sleep.  Although it is the least disruptive for me, I think the next step will be to try to cut that 10-11 feeding and see if he can make it until 1:00; I don't mind the nursing, but I think it will help both of us if he can get a longer sleep stretch than 2-3 hrs.  Then I'll work on the second half of the night, which has always been more challenging anyway.

What is helping me enormously is that I'm not nursing/rocking and stuck in my bed with him for hours on end.  I can actually take a shower (!) and spend some time with LG in the evening.

Like I said, I'm not sold on this method, but I'm willing to give it a full week, at least, before making a decision about how to proceed.

CIO Night 2

We (that is, I) slept better last night.  Still too foggy to recall all the details.

The one regression was that he woke at both naptime and bedtime after 30 minutes.  Which, to my mind, means that it's not (solely?) a sleep association problem but something that makes it difficult for him to move through sleep cycles.  After that first 30 minute hump, he did sleep until 10:20 (so, maybe 2.5 hours?).  He slept with me (I think) until he woke up around 1:00ish.  And then back in the crib until 3:00.  And then back with me until 5:00.  Or something like that.

The exact times I moved him back and forth are pretty fuzzy, but it seems he spent about half the night in the crib and half the night with me.  He sleeps more soundly in the crib, and he seems to wake every ~2-3 hours until around 3:00, which has always been a sucky time for him, and then it really is close to hourly.

But at least it's not the all-night suckathon.  Because the problem, really, isn't that he nurses.  It's that he smacks and paws and pinches and the sucking isn't productive/nutritive, it's a half-sucking that makes me want to rip my nipples off.  And who can sleep through that?

When he nurses for food, he generally finishes and rolls away from me.

So.  I'll keep it up for another few days to see.  And if I catch up even a little bit on sleep, I might be able to have a firmer resolve in the middle of the night to keep him in the crib.  But the goal right now is simply MORE SLEEP.  I don't mind continuing to co-sleep if we actually sleep.

CIO clearly is not the worst thing in the world and might be helping.  But it certainly isn't--for us, anyway--one of those tales of a baby crying for an hour one night and then twenty minutes and being done.  It's about 20 minutes of unrelentless screaming every time.  And if that doesn't change, I don't think I'll keep it up.

I do have a mantra I tell him as I put him down:  "Mama loves you.  And I will come back for you.  But right now you need to nap in your crib so you are healthy and grow."  Helps me at least.

The First Night

Writing this mostly so I have a record.  Still to tired to keep things in my brain.

As I recall, Tiny Boy slept in his crib from 7:20-10:00 something.  He nursed, I think I put him back in the crib until around 1:00.  Then he slept with me for a bit.  Then back in the crib from maybe 3-5.  And then with me.  He nursed maybe 3-4 times (for a short period) total.

So I need to clarify when I'll keep him in bed with me and when he needs to be in the crib (my ideal, I think, would be that he's in the crib until midnight or later and then either the crib or my bed, but not both, until morning).  But, knock wood, we're moving in the right direction.

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I must say, listening to him cry (and this is a real cry, not fussing) is heartbreaking.  But when you usually spend more time getting the child to sleep than he actually sleeps--and often he cries when being rocked anyway--well, it seems pretty obvious what to do.

Never Say Never (II)

So it turns out after you let your baby scream for an hour in the middle of the night, it becomes easier to do so during the day.  (I think it also helps being so sleep deprived that the usual cortisol response to that CRY is dulled.)

Anyhoo.  I decided that if Tiny Boy did not nurse himself to sleep at naptime, he was being dumped in the crib.  And 17 minutes of wailing later, I had a sleeping baby.  He slept for 1.5 hours, people.  In. The. Crib.  With no maternal intervention.  I think that's the first time since maybe 8 weeks or so that I've been able to do something during naptime.

Made the same resolution tonight.  We nursed.  We rocked.  We read a book.  Good night, Tiny Boy.  25 minutes later, sleeping baby.  We'll see how long it lasts.

But I actually got to spend time with LG, who is finishing up painting her fingernails (an obscene combination of yellow and maroon, if you must know) and generally enjoying being a girl.

Now if he stays asleep more than 40 minutes, I might just try this again.

Never Say Never (A Post on CIO)

Well.

After Tiny Boy went to bed at 8:30, and sucked on me around 9:00 and 10:00 and 12:00 and 1:00 and 1:30 and 2:00 and 2:45 and somewhere around 3:00, at which point he also started crawling around my bed, I proceeded to give him tylenol and dump him in the crib.

He fussed for a few minutes and went to sleep.  By 4:00 he was awake again.  Didn't fall back to sleep on his own.  Didn't nurse back to sleep. 

(Have I mentioned that I'm not entirely sure I ever went back to sleep after the 1:00 waking?  Or certainly not after the 3:00.)

I changed his fat diaper, put him back in the crib and left him there.  Took my pillow downstairs.  Somewhere around 5:15 (roughly an hour after I left him) the crying stopped.  I vaguely wondered if he stopped breathing, but not enough to check.

I went back up stairs at some point, to find him huddled in a corner sniffling, and mostly asleep.

He woke at 6:15 and wailed for a few minutes and went back to sleep again, until 7:15.

The horrible irony is I didn't.  (That's what happens when sleep deprivation meets my old pal insomnia.)

Not sure what I'm going to do with him tonight.

Sigh.