Sleeping continues to be a challenge around here. Specifically, it continues to take us a LONG time to soothe the girls enough to fall asleep at night, which means they’re going to bed LATE. And then, they both wake repeatedly during the night, sometimes just crying out for help retrieving a Binky; sometimes sitting/standing up in bed and demanding to be picked up and bounced back to sleep. It’s exhausting.
It’s also incredibly frustrating. When we talk to friends/family about our challenge, they convey clearly that it *shouldn’t* be this hard. We’re left feeling certain that we’re doing something wrong, but we’ve been utterly unable to figure out what. In fact, their sleeping has gotten *worse* since May, and we haven’t been able to figure out why.
Since we started the girls on “solids” in May, both have had occasional trouble with gastrointestinal distress. In addition, while Sam rarely spits up or has wet burbs or hiccups, Cate *still* struggles daily with reflux. Further, feeding girls solids three times adds 90 minutes to their daily routines. We’ve tried adjusting both the timing and content of their meals, but with little obvious effect.
We’ve also adjusted the white noise in the bedroom. During their first winter, we just ran the house HVAC fan all the time, and the blower hum worked great to mask household and other noises. When the weather got hot this spring, running the fan all the time raised the humidity intolerably. So in May, we switched to using the Sleep Sheep that Sierra and Izzy picked out for the girls. Its gentle stream noise worked pretty well, but its timer shut it off after 44 minutes. Within a few weeks, three people observed that whenever the sheep shut off, Sam would open her eyes, roll over, and look at them sitting in the chair as if to say, “Well? Are you going to turn it back on now or what?” Getting up to turn the sheep back on every 44 minutes all night was not better than getting up to Bink babies that often, so we finally bought a Marpac sound conditioner that makes white noise as long as we need it to. Within a day, Sam began occasionally sleeping 2-3 hours at a stretch for the first time in weeks.
Cate has been teething since mid-June, and Sam got her first tooth a week ago, and teething pain is assuredly an issue. Tylenol at bedtime helped Cate a little, but not enough, but didn’t seem to help Sam much. Bill bought some ibuprofen for us to try tonight, but there has to be more to our sleep problem than teething.
A handful of people said, “oh, you just have to let them ‘cry it out’ and they’ll sleep great!” When I pressed for details, most of them admitted that their baby generally slept well, but couldn’t quite fall asleep unassisted, or slept all night until 5 am, when they wanted them to sleep until 6 am. None of the stories I heard sounded like ours, and specifically, none involved night wakings. Further, I have deep misgivings about abandoning our children to cry on purpose. I don’t buy for an instant that kids suddenly learn to soothe themselves; rather, I imagine they learn that parents no longer come when they cry and stop bothering. That’s not a lesson I’m eager to teach our children. Further, I’ve read several accounts of babies who cry inconsolably for days or a week or more, without getting any closer to sleep. All of that isn’t helped by having a *second* baby in the house doing the same thing. We’re not willing to risk that yet.
* * *
Unclear what to try next, I finally pulled out the Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child book again. I re-read some parts that didn’t stick four months ago, and was struck. It says that night waking — or specifically waking but then failing to fall back asleep unassisted — is almost always caused by overtiredness/exhaustion. Babies who have stayed up past becoming drowsy make stress hormones (cortisol) to stay awake longer, and then have trouble falling asleep (again) by themselves. Uh oh.
According to Weissbluth’s data, the average baby (4-11 months old) gets 11 hours of night sleep, plus 3-1/2 hours of daytime nap sleep, for a total of 14-1/2 hours sleep daily. Half of babies get MORE than that. Looking at my iPhone (Total Baby) app data, Sam and Cate nap well enough for 3 to 3-1/2 hours a day. But they only get 8 to 9-1/2 hours overnight, for a total of 11 to 13 hours total sleep daily, which is a LOT less than average. No wonder they’re tired and have an impossible time falling asleep by themselves!
Dr. Weissbluth says that night waking almost always occurs because parents allow bedtime to be too late (after 7 pm, or less than 12 hours from wake-up time) or don’t allow enough time for naps. We have been starting bedtime routines around 7 or 7:30 pm and it often takes an hour (or more!) to soothe wired girls down to sleep, which is way too long/late.
Further, he says that some babies (e.g. Sam) are extremely sensitive to disruptions in their environment or changes to their schedule. He says that consistency is key. Finally, Weissbluth says that if a baby is overtired, that crying it out will not work! (Good to know!)
So… starting immediately, we’re simplifying solids and probably reducing to twice a day only, and eliminating activities that lead to us keeping the babies up too long. We’re going to WORK HARD to get them to bed — meaning asleep — by 7 pm, with morning and afternoon naps on a more-rigid schedule. Our profoundest hope is that getting them more sleep overall will improve/solve the night waking problem without us having to resort to any of the crying methods. Wish us luck!
