Sleep Struggles

The past 6 months with my darling son has been, among other things, a roller coaster of sleep patterns. And more often than not this roller coaster has made me sick with sleep deprivation.

From the start he ate every two hours around the clock, with a few 5+ hour sessions of cluster feeding thrown in once in a while for good measure. Just before 3 months he started falling into a more predictable sleep pattern, and although he was still a frequent waker/nurser, he started giving me the odd 4 or 5 hour stretch of sleep. Then around 4 months that first stretch of sleep became a safe bet, and sometimes I'd even get 6 hours out of him. I even started wondering if that dreaded 4 month sleep regression I had heard about would somehow skip us?

Then as we approached 5 months it all fell back to shit. He had never been one to go to bed "for the night" at a decent time, always staying up past 11 pm and sometimes as late as midnight. But at 5 months, that 11 pm became 12:45 am, and then 1:30...and oh. my. GAWD, sometimes 2:00 IN THE MORNING. And he'd still be up every few hours after that to eat.

He used to sleep in until 10 or 11 am, to compensate for his stupidly late bedtime. Then that shifted and he began to wake up between 8:30 and 9 am. I became prematurely excited at that point, thinking that the time had come where he would start going to bed earlier and our sleep troubles would begin to disappear. Well, I was sadly mistaken. One thing did improve, in that he would start to get tired around 9 pm. But he wouldn't sleep, and if he did it was a short nap. Just enough to refresh him so he could continue to party into the night.

We are now at the point where things have calmed down again, and the pattern is more predictable. Except it's just as terrible as it was when he was a newborn. I can still get him to bed by 9 pm. Except he will without fail wake up between 45 minutes to an hour later. And then he may or may not go back to sleep. If he does go back to sleep, he needs rocking and soothing to get him there and he needs it multiple times before he is truly back to sleep again. If we can't get him to go back to dreamland, he stays up for a couple more hours, often past midnight. And then he's up every three hours, almost to the minute, to eat.

I've been pretty stubborn, trying to avoid any sort of crying it out and attempting to just ride these waves. My hope is that he will regulate his own sleep eventually. And although sometimes I feel like I have a better chance of seeing a Yeti ride a Unicorn across a double rainbow, I still hold on to this belief because he's done it before with his nap schedule. That's right. He never used to nap on a schedule, or for longer than 30 minutes at a time. Well folks, I'm proud to say that my little man figured it out at some point and now naps three times a day, for 30 minutes minimum rather than maximum. So I still believe the rest of this sleep stuff will eventually work itself out.

However, I feel that now we are at a point in this road where if I don't step in and do something, sleep habits will be ingrained in him that we may never be able to undo. I'm talking about the type of sleep problems that will keep him living at home FOREVER because he will simply be unable to stay asleep without a lengthy nightly ritual involving rocking, shushing and bum patting for the rest of his life.

So I have narrowed down the things I feel he needs help with, and I'm ready to start with a plan to help him sleep better. So far we have moved him into his own room, which is going well because he's no longer in our bed treating me like the nightly special at an all you can eat buffet. But it's not helping with the frequent wake-ups.

Problem #1 is the habitual waking after an hour of being put down for the night.
Problem #2 is the frequent waking throughout the night, at which he expects to be fed.

Goal #1 is to stop the habitual waking after an hour.
Goal #2 is to at least get back to the 4 or 5 hour stretches of sleep, and to wean down to 1 or 2 night feedings max. 

Problem #1 is the easier one to tackle, because I can do it on my own or with minimal assistance from my husband. Problem #2 is harder, because it requires him to get up in the night to help soothe the little man. So this is basically reserved only for weekends when my husband doesn't have to be up at ungodly hours in the morning so that he can go in to work early in an attempt to get home with enough time to spend with us. Weekends aren't long enough to make any sort of lasting impression, so we're waiting for holidays in order to really put in the time and commitment we'll need.

So on to Problem #1. My plan is to try the "wake to sleep" method, which you can read more about here (and various other places on the internet, but that was my main source of information). Basically, the theory is that if you have a habitual waker like mine, who wakes every hour or so for no reason other than habit, chances are the baby is having trouble transitioning from one sleep cycle to the next. As adults, we wake up multiple times in the night, but we have the ability to fall right back asleep. We might switch positions, fix our pillow, pull up our blankets, but in the morning we will hardly remember waking at all. Unfortunately babies can't always go from one sleep cycle to the next as easily, and need help with the transition.

The "wake to sleep" method instructs you to go to your baby before their habitual wake-up time, and do something to slightly rouse them from their sleep. You don't want to go in and wake them up so that they're alert, you only want to wake them just enough so that they can easily settle back down, and you essentially reset their sleep cycle. So, maybe you go in and fix their blankets, reposition them, or even change their diaper. Basically, that depends on your baby and how heavy they sleep (when they're actually sleeping). Then, you stay with them until you're sure they're back asleep. The thought is that by consistently doing this at the same time every night, you are breaking them of their habit of waking up at their habitual time, and helping them transition into a new sleep cycle. That's just my understanding and quick explanation- don't take my word as gospel and attempt any sort of sleep using only my advice.

"Wake to sleep" is part one of my plan. The other part is that I'm also going to refrain from picking him up when he wakes and needs my help to resettle. My little man does know how to soothe himself. I see him do it for almost every nap, every day. For some reason night times are more difficult for him, and he doesn't put his mad skillz to use. We've been picking him up and rocking him back to sleep at night when he wakes up, and I think we're helping to give him bad sleep habits because it seems he's starting to depend on us for this. So my new plan is to go in, reposition him and make him comfy again, and then only pat his back and shush him instead of picking him up. Unless of course it's obvious that he needs a little more contact, like if he's in some sort of pain or discomfort.

Tonight was the first night of my plan. I went in to try "waking him to sleep", by adjusting his blanket and rubbing his back. He stirred and repositioned himself, and I stayed with my hand on his back until I heard his little sigh, and his breathing became deeper again. Unfortunately he woke up about 10 minutes later, but I went in and soothed him back to sleep without picking him up. Although I had to go in there two more times after that, I'm still feeling good because I've heard him stir a few more times but I haven't had to go in. And we haven't had any tears, so that makes me happy.

Wish me luck! This could be a long week...