My mother estimates that my brother slept about half as much as I did when we were children. I still have trouble if I don't get 8-9 hours a night. Unfortunately, I think Dorothy takes after Jeff, not me.
Dorothy started off pretty well on the sleep front. By ten weeks or so, she was reliably getting one five-hour stretch in every night, which is pretty long for a baby that age. (In fact, an uninterrupted five-hour stretch is the medical definition of "sleeping through the night" for a baby). But she pretty much hasn't stretched it out any longer than that, even now. She's had one or two nights where she slept for six or more hours, but it's usually five or less. The problem is, since she's been going to bed around 8:00 or so, and we are often up two or three hours later than that, we don't really get to enjoy the long stretch of sleep.
We started trying to change that using a technique that had been recommended to us by a couple of people. We'd wake her up around 11:00 to feed, and then not feed her until 5:00 AM. The theory is that after a few nights of adjustment, babies will get used to having their long stretch around midnight to five, so the adults can get some quality sleep then.
Dorothy adapted pretty quickly to going six hours without eating. She complained a bit, but certainly wasn't inconsolable. However, she didn't want to make the next step of actually sleeping during all that time. Since I need to go to work in the mornings and Tom at least has the option of taking a nap, he does most of the nighttime parenting, except for feedings (I've learned how to feed her lying down, so I can at least doze or sometimes even go all the way to sleep). We (he) stuck it out for a couple of weeks, but she just didn't want to sleep at night any more - she wanted to play, and if there was no one to play with her, she wanted to scream. What's worse, her regular bedtime became kind of unpredictable, and I started sleeping less because it didn't seem worth it to go to bed at 10, just to get up at 11 to feed the baby, so I would just stay up until 11.
We've more or less abandoned the not-letting-her-eat-until-5, and she's slowly readjusting. The last night or two, I've gotten up to feed her twice, but she's otherwise slept pretty well. But last week, she woke up every night sometime between 2:30 and 3:30 demanding play. She wasn't fussy; she just wanted to make loud happy noises. I slept on the couch a couple of nights, since I wake up to her sounds very easily when we're in the same room. Poor Tom was so exhausted I don't know how he made it through the days.
It doesn't help that she doesn't take the two or three long naps that babies her age are supposed to take during the day, either. Instead, she's been sleeping in 30-minute catnaps every couple of hours. It used to be that you could set your watch by her - at 31 minutes, her eyes would fly open and she'd be totally awake. In the last few days, now that she can roll over reliably, we've started putting her down to sleep on her side or her tummy, and she sometimes sleeps a little longer that way. But she rarely naps for as much as an hour at a time, even then.
The one way that she will sometimes sleep for longer is if she sleeps with me. In fact, she'll often sleep for two hours or more if I lie down with her. But I don't sleep well when I'm holding her. Since we're in a waterbed, I feel nervous about her not being able to lift her head enough to breathe if she rolls onto her tummy. So I hold her with her head pillowed on my shoulder. This is comfortable for the first hour or so, but then I start dying to roll over. By the time she wakes up, I have stiff aching muscles from staying in the same position for so long, and I don't feel a bit rested.
So we still don't really have a solution for sleep yet. In our tracking of her sleep patterns, we estimate that Dorothy sleeps a total of about 11-12 hours out of 24, which is somewhat less than average for a baby of her age, but not totally out of the ballpark. But we just don't know how to get her to sleep in a way that lets us get enough sleep, too.
Posted by Elizabeth Nugent at September 11, 2004 10:27 PM