Working in the dark

Regular readers may have noticed a distinct slow down in the number of posts in September. In part this is due to my new teaching course which when combined with being a father means that I have little time or energy to write. It's also in part because Jake has reached his next developmental stage meaning that he is waking up a lot during the night. The result of our swaddling experiment was that there was little or no difference whether we put him in the Wombie or not.

I was resigned to endless nights of broken sleep and hard days at work (or days fueled by strong coffee!), but fortunately Kelsey had other ideas. When she took Jake to get weighed today (15.5lbs for those counting) she also asked the midwife about his sleeping habits and apparently we've been coming it at it from the wrong approach for a while:

Our belief - only put him in his Wombie at night so he associates it with a longer sleep
The advice - whatever you do at night, do for his naps during the day so he associates a certain pattern with sleep rather than catnaps. This may explain why he's never really been one for long sleeps during the day, meaning that he gets cranky in the evenings.

Our belief - he's just been getting hungry at night
The advice - a kid of Jake's age and size should be able to sleep through the night (and indeed he was when we were in the US). He has gone through a growth spurt recently meaning that he needs more food, but that should come through the day, and we've gone out and bought "hungry" milk on their advice. By feeding him in the night, we may have been creating a pattern that would be hard to break which makes sense to our way of thinking. My only concern is that we're going to have a lot of crying over the next few nights and I don't want to think that my baby is lying in the dark, hungry and upset. However, this may be something I need to deal with if it helps him develop good sleeping patterns and gets me some much needed sleep.

Our belief - getting him to sleep downstairs is a good idea as you avoid any crying or fighting sleep when you put him to bed
The advice - he's at the age where he can learn patterns and routines and if rocking or singing him to sleep is done all the time, then he may learn to depend on this which may make falling asleep alone harder. We put him to bed in his own room tonight and tried to set up a simple routine of food, change into a night nappy, story and sleep sack. His eyes were still open when we left and there was around 5 minutes of noises but there's now been nothing for the last hour.

I'm really pleased that Kelsey got the advice today, but I'm also a little frustrated that it wasn't given freely as part of our exit from hospital or as part of the health visits early on. The leaflet they gave us is full of good ideas and reasons behind and match up with our own reading and thinking. It worries me that we could have gone on just accepting a lack of sleep without any strategies to try.

P.S. For those people who have children of their own and have their own stories to tell about sleep training, it would be good to know your strategies, failures and successes. However, please accept that this blog is also a personal diary for me to look back on rather than a prescriptive journal on how I think all babies should be treated. With that in mind, keep coming back as I'll be posting about the success (or lack thereof) of these approaches over the coming days/weeks/months.