Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Bed time blues.

Some moms are lucky enough to have babes that love to sleep. Some moms have to fight to get their babes to sleep. I fall some where in between.
I am lucky that Elliott seemed to hear and understand when the doctor told me "By four months of age, babies have no physiological need to eat in the middle of the night. They can go 10 hours or so without food over night" A few days before he turned four months he slept through the night for the first time. It wasn't a complete sleep through. At that point in time he was going to bed at 8pm, waking up at 12am, 3:30am, 5:30am, 7:30am, and then finally at 9:30am. He woke up at the typical 12am, but then stayed asleep until 7am! It was awesome. I woke up, like many moms before me, and was convinced he had died in his sleep... he was fine, sleeping away.
He gets up now at 4:30am in the morning for a feeding and goes back to sleep till between 7am and 8am. As mentioned in my previous post I don't go to bed when he does. But I am normally asleep around 1am. So I am getting not a bad amount of sleep.
There one thing that drive me nuts about Elliott's bed time needs. He still likes to be swaddled! We have tried several times to ween him off of this need. We even went as far as buying a Woombie, web site here: Woombie This product is a great idea. Elliott however does not only need to be swaddled to stop the startle reflex and his hands pawing at his face, but he also needs his legs all tucked in together. My weird little man. Our routine is as follows now: We put him to bed on his belly (we have an angelcare monitor, Angelcare which tells us if he is breathing or not). Then he wakes up around 4:30amish and I feed him, and then swaddle him. We were not swaddling him originally and just putting him back to bed on his stomach, but he was waking up every two hours and wanting to start his day at 6am. The 10 days we did that for I kind went crazy from lack of sleep. Once we went back to swaddling him half way through the night I got enough sleep and the dark cloud lifted.
I am lucky though. I know several women that did not get a full night sleep until well after their babes where over the age of one. I am just concerned what will happen as he grows and its just not possible to swaddle him. I hope he outgrows this need before that happens.

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