Diana outlined some of the issues she's had with sleep lately, both her own and for Simon. I've seen first hand how cranky and unmanageable he can be during the day, and it's not fun at all. Adding to the problem is that the advice people offer is generally only applicable to their kid, and the so-called professionals selling books and DVD's often have conflicting advice. So all you can really do is take in the information available, and do your best. What absolutely doesn't work is random experimentation (what a lot of the typical advice is), as doing so only demonstrates a lack of understanding of the problem domain.
Diana learned several solid things from a recent book. The first is that kids Simon's age need about two naps during the day, and typically will sleep longer at night if they go to bed earlier. To this point, given his eating desires and typical young baby's short sleep cycles, we pretty much put him to bed when he seemed tired. As it turns out, the better thing to do is put him down before he gets to that point. That's a hard thing to unlearn considering we spent a great deal of time in his early weeks doing everything possible to get him 100% out cold before putting him down.
The night time thing might actually be a selfish mistake, because when he's all chilled out in the evening, giggling and smiling and being social, you want to keep him out there. This is especially true for me, since I don't get to see him much during the week. This new bed time schedule is going to limit me to two hours tops in the evening, and I already leave work by 4:30. But starting Friday we worked on this, and the results have been mostly good. Friday night he slept almost 7 hours, fed, and then did another 4. The trick now is to get the napping right, and the theory goes that he'll adopt this cycle after awhile. From some of the things I've read, I'm not convinced since some experts suggest babies don't really start to form habits until somewhere between three and six months, but considering how huge he is, I'm going to cross my fingers and hope he overachieves at this too.
What sucks is that Diana is always tired. Telling her "it gets better" does not help. When I'm here, I can at least take him off her hands, and I do try to balance that with my own endeavors on weekends (and try to get couple time on top of that), but it still doesn't make the overnight feed, early morning and then business hours that Simon is all-mommy, all of the time, any easier. If that weren't enough, trying to make rational choices that help him when you're crazy tired is that much harder. I felt like we had a good rhythm going just before the end of my leave, but as a one person job, this is clearly taking its toll.
The best I can do in terms of my optimism is to remind Diana that he's at 10 weeks, and the changes are remarkable, constant and come quickly. The adjustments to sleep have only really been going on for a week, and the night-time sleep just since Friday. The result of these efforts could come in the next few days, and we'll have a happier little boy who is also healthier for it. I'm looking forward to the long weekend coming up soon, so I can be a little more active with the lad, and hopefully reduce the burden on Diana, even if it is temporary.
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