Baby sleep is pretty challenging, especially in those first two or three months. But at that stage, it's mostly because the parents aren't getting any. The baby is getting what he or she needs, just not in long overnight stretches.
On my birthday, we left Simon with his Uncle Joe for the afternoon while we caught a movie. Something he said when got back has stuck with me since... "Man, that kid won't sleep unless conditions are perfect." He couldn't have been more right, and four weeks later, the situation has not improved.
Simon's required sleep conditions are that he's swaddled, the pacifier is in his mouth and (preferably) there's some white noise. I suppose to be more precise, those are the conditions he needs to fall asleep. Once he's sleeping, he could be naked anywhere in complete silence. But geting there is what's hard. The outcome of this is that if he wakes up, for any reason, he won't likely go back to sleep. He gets out of the swaddle, the binky goes somewhere he can't find it, and the Sleep Sheep has itself gone to sleep. If it happens frequently, particularly in the early dark hours of the evening, that generally means Diana gets up countless times to re-swaddle/bink/sheep. It's probably not good for either one of them. I'm useless in part because I don't hear him, and during the week Diana takes the overnight feedings so I'm not useless for work.
"They" say that this is the result of building certain requirements for sleep, and the solution is to break these requirements by getting them off the ideal conditions. That means lots of crying and reassurance that they'll be OK. Diana has a very visceral and intense reaction to his crying, so naturally that's very hard for her. I don't care for it either, but as we speak, Diana has earplugs and is napping, and I'm trying to get him to cry it out for his nap.
Unfortunately, there are all kinds of complications at the moment. For one, the poor kid is teething, so at times he just feels lousy to begin with. The other problem is that his manual dexterity isn't quite good enough to position things in an ideal way for him to put in his mouth, which helps him self-sooth, especially when his teeth bother him. He's pretty close, and I've seen him get his pacifier oriented right, but mostly he ends up getting which ever part he can in his mouth. There are a few things he should probably be doing on his own that he isn't yet, including rolling over, but given his extreme weight, he might not be strong enough yet. The other issue is that when he's not swaddled, the first thing he does is take out his pacifier, so there's a big chicken-egg scenario playing out there.
So we're working through it. Even while observing him so far this afternoon, I've noticed that his favorite stuffed animal, a long fabric thing with a tiger head on the end, seems to offer him some comfort. I'm sure he'll get there eventually, but it's hard to hear him cry.
No comments yet.