Yesterday was definitely not a complete success, but neither was it an unmitigated failure. The morning nap, during which I wrote my last post, went relatively smoothly -- it only lasted about 45 minutes, but sadly that is not entirely unusual with Stephen's resistance to naps. The afternoon nap, however, was a different story. Stephen cried from about 11:30 on and off until almost 2, sometimes sleeping for fifteen minutes but mostly fussing and crying and occasionally screaming his head off with reckless abandon. When I tried to give him the pacifier, he pushed it out of his mouth when he tried to get his fingers in there, but then when he did get his thumb into his mouth half the time he cried harder. Finally, about 2:15 he fell asleep. He even woke up at 2:50, cried briefly, and put himself back to sleep without me intervening (I stood outside his door, which was cracked open, for a couple of minutes before rushing in and happily he soothed himself!). I decided he had the right idea and crashed myself for an hour, and when he woke me up at 3:50 we both felt much better about the world in general.
He napped again from 5-6, and went down without much of a fight. At bedtime, he actually fell asleep with his thumb in his mouth without crying at all, but then woke up two hours later at 10 and was immensely frustrated when I tried to get him to suck his thumb to go back to sleep. After about fifteen minutes, I decided that maybe swaddling is still a good idea for nighttime for the time being, as the prospect of three hours of crying in the middle of the day is very different than the same three hour period in the middle of the night. As it is he's back to only sleeping four hours at a time (after three glorious weeks in which he slept a six-hour stretch followed by two shorter stretches and twice only woke up once in the night), so anything I can do to get him to sleep a little better at night is still worth it.
This morning's nap went pretty smoothly so far -- he only took about ten minutes to fall asleep. I had to prompt him to get his thumb in his mouth a few times by rubbing my finger along the inside of his upper lip, but he's definitely getting the idea better today than he did yesterday. Maybe next week we'll try again to leave his arms unswaddled at night, depending on how he does with that during the day.
2 comments:
I'm just tossing this out there because you mentioned before that Stephen's arms flail when he's trying to sleep:
I've found with both my babies that swaddling is more important for tiny babies than the sucking thing. If mine were swaddled, they went to sleep with or without the pacifier. We never went in to replug them with pacifier or thumb or whatever, the swaddle felt comforting and helped them sleep. I would put the pacifier in after they were swaddled, but Jack always spit his right out and still went to sleep. Even now, I put Jack in a loose swaddle to go to sleep, because he wiggles out of it but the feeling of the flannel (all of our baby blankets for swaddling have been light flannel) is comforting to him now and that is how he soothes.
Just a thought - I know it can be irritating to have other people say "well what worked for MY kids was..." when your baby is different. I won't be offended if you do something totally different. :)
After this afternoon's unpleasantness, I think you're definitely right about the swaddling still being important. I put him down to bed firmly swaddled and will probably keep up with that for as long as it takes. Right now I'm going to go to bed and hope that he sleeps for at least a few more hours!
Post a Comment