Tonight we start The Sleep Challenge. If we were TLC (The Learning Channel, not the late 90’s hip-hop/pop trio) this would make pretty good TV. However, this is real life. And this is HBomb, so, well, it’s gonna suck. Jen and I have been in disagreement about getting H to sleep better. As any frequent reader knows, H doesn’t like to sleep. His mom and dad do. It’s a constant battle. Some nights he’s up 5+ times. Three nights since he was born he only awoke twice. Those nights were spectacular.
So this disagreement goes something like this: I think he should be able to cry it out for 10 minutes at night. Jen thinks he shouldn’t. Experts, as with all things baby, are all over the board. Find a reasonable solution and you’ll find a book by an expert with cold hard facts that agrees with you.
In our case the pediatrician is the end-all-be-all expert in question. So when we have diasgreements, she settles them. So the word from god, I mean the pediatricain, is to start The Sleep Challenge. We are starting him off on rice cereal in hopes that it fills him up, then are to put him to bed in his crib when he’s almost asleep and make him put himself to sleep. If he wines, we are to let him be. If he throws a fit, we need to comfort him but not offer food. The end game is to get him weened from the many feedings a night to two all the time, and finally to one.
The game starts now. We gave him the cereal which seemed quite disagreeable to him (or he was getting crying and laughing mixed up again. Yah, right.) and then he had 3oz of formula. Today he barely slept at all and ate a ton, so we have that in our favor. So Jen put him down (isn’t that the same thing you say about a horse that you have killed?) when he was still awake and he… fell asleep. So far so good… but for how long?
Madeleine says:
May 5th, 2005 at 9:07 pm
Ohhhh, this is the hardest thing. I hope it is going well for all of you, or at least for the grownups. Sending love and “you ARE good parents” vibes your way.
mrscrumley says:
May 6th, 2005 at 8:14 am
Good Morning to you! Good morning to you! Tell us how Hayes slept and if you did too…
Weaning them off the middle of the night feedings is hard. I am thinking of ya’ll.
Jennifer says:
May 6th, 2005 at 8:54 am
Good luck. I remember this to well. We did it too! The good news is that it did work!! But it took a few nights (Loooooong looooong nights).
Hope all goes well.
Nabeel says:
May 6th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
“Today he barely slept at all and ate a ton, so we have that in our favor”
Just a quick note, after careful study (I track way to many statistics as my way to compensate for lack of control over this whole baby growing thing) — it seems that days that our child doesn’t sleep much during the day is pretty much the days that he doesn’t sleep well at night.
I think this is something about him getting overtired, therefore agitated, therefore unable to get himself to fall asleep or stay asleep.
Days he sleeps a bunch during the day, he seems to sleep better at night. It’s a little counter-intuitive, and it certainly sucks from the point of it being a downward spiral, but just something we noticed with our kid.