Sleep - Another Milestone

Another change in her sleeping habits - I usually sit in the chair in her room and carry her for a bit (5 - 10 minutes) till she's slightly drowsy (but not asleep) before putting her into her cot.

Yesterday and this evening, as I sat her down, she pointed at her cot. I asked her "Ellie, do you want to be in your bed?" and she said "Bed". I wasn't ready to put her down yet so I asked her for a big kiss, which she happily gave "MUAH!" before I placed her in her cot. She scrambled down, clutching her little bolster and started rolling around.

I said "Good girl", "Good night" "See you" to which she giggled loudly and said "See you!" back before I left the room and closed the door. I can still hear her talking to herself as I type this, but I know she'll settle down to sleep on her own in a few more minutes.

Snuggling before she falls asleep is actually one of my favourite times with her (it's one of the few times that she actually lays still and lets me hug her) so I'm a little sad to see it go. But I'm also pleased that she's making the transition on her own. Oh well, my little girl is growing up :)

Sleep - Another Milestone

Last night, and tonight, putting Ellis to bed was good.

I bring her into the room. I sit down on a chair and hold her, facing me.

I turn on the music from the baby monitor.

In about 10 minutes, she dozes off on my chest.

I flip her around, stand up and walk to her crib.

I put her down.

Usually by the time I put her down she's very sleepy, so she flips over onto her tummy and goes straight to sleep.  If she's not sleepy enough, she will flip and stand with arms raised toward me, crying to be carried.

Last night and tonight:

I put her down.

She flips over, stands up in her crib, arms outstretched. 

I give her a hug and kiss(es).

I step away and wave. She waves back. 

I say "Bye". Ellis says "Bye".

I say "Muah!" (flying kiss). She does the same.

I walk toward the door. 

I tell her "Night-night" and "Sweet dreams and sleep well. Mummy will see you in the morning".

She's still standing in her crib, looking at me.

I walk out, peek inside and do a last wave. She waves again.

I shut the door behind me. No sound. 

She goes to sleep. On her own.

I'm so proud of my little girl :)

photo of the day 18.10.08

Sleepyhead

it's so hard to get a photo of her when she's sleeping because she tends to wake quite easily with just some slight sound. she must have been very tired on this day because she didn't stir when we opened the door to her room. I hesitated for a little too long - you can see her just coming out of her sleep here with the one eye open...

The Girl who does in fact, Sleep

"(A good) sleep routine is the cornerstone for sane mothers and happy children" (paraphrased)

I love this line taken from my friend Sher's blog because it is SO true.

It's such a good line that I have been using it on all my mum-to-be friends, reminding them to not make the same mistake I made because I didn't realise this earlier.

Several people have enquired about Ellis' sleep habits after I posted about it:

1. The girl who doesn't Sleep 29th March

2. The girl who still doesn't Sleep (part 2) 31st March

3. Starting Sleep Training 10th April.

4. Sleep Improvement 13th May. At this point, she was doing an erratic average of 2 naps a day - I willingly and deliberately rocked her each nap time to sleep and held her till she was in a deep sleep before putting her down. This was quite a bit of effort but she did manage around 45 minutes of sleep each time. Only thing is that I had to be VERY careful putting her down because if she wasn't in a sufficiently deep sleep she would stir, cry and everything would be over.

It actually got WORSE after that last post. Almost suddenly, she started struggling when I tried to rock her to sleep. It was impossible to do so - she would lift her feet, place them on my chest and push away. It got frustrating. I actually resorted to nursing her to get her to sleep and regressed from 3 hour to 2 1/2 hour feeds.

About the same time, I was introduced to Tracy Hoggs' The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems by a friend - a book I highly recommend if you need to get your baby on a routine. I bought the book, pored over it, put Ellis on the recommended routine (EASY) and started using her sleep techniques.

From a baby whom I thought "just doesn't do naps", I am now pleased to report that the girl does, in fact, SLEEP.

Here is our current nap routine:

+ Watch for sleep cues. If none, I will initiate nap routine about 1.5 - 2 hours from her last wake time.
+ Pop in her pacifier. Carry her to her room. Play some soothing music.
+ Hold her a bit so she can wind down and settle. Most times I sing or talk to her quietly. Sometimes we have a bit of fun; I tickle her or pretend to nibble on her fingers which she finds extremely amusing. I don't want to overstimulate her though, so this is kept to a minimum. It's really just to make her feel more comfortable.
+ She may squirm a little, which usually means she wants me to put her down. I put her in the crib WIDE AWAKE (no crying), give her her little bolster and a small toy.

+ I tell her that it's her nap time and that I'm going out but I will see her when she wakes up. At this point she usually gives me a cheeky grin. (I think she's thinking to herself :"Yup, Mum I know the drill - you want me to sleep on my own now yada yada yada....")
+ Give her a kiss and leave.
+ She plays for 5 to 10 minutes - and then sleeps on her own (I know because I hear a lot of rustling, and then silence)
+ The whole routine takes 10 minutes or less IF she is already sleepy. A little longer if she's not very sleepy. If she's overtired/overstimulated - it is very difficult, practically impossible to get her to sleep. She'll rub her eyes, fall asleep in my arms but will wake on contact with the crib.
+ Current naps are a minimum of 45 minutes, typically 1 hour 15 mins and have on the rare occasion gone over 2 hours (I actually had to wake her up!)

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About the Baby Whisperer, Tracy Hoggs - Reviews I've read indicate that parents either love or hate her - her tone doesn't go down well with some, and you need to flip around to get all the relevant information, but I did find the book very useful because it gave me a frame of reference to work with.

Her routine for babies is EASY (Eat, Activity, Sleep, You time) and has useful and detailed tips for dealing with common sleep issues - lengthening naps, sleeping through the night, early wakers etc.

Her sleep training technique Pick Up/Put Down is a good alternative for parents who are not comfortable with the more well known Cry it Out method. I used PU/PD on Ellis - can't say it worked entirely but it was a good place to start. It took some made MAJOR modifications along the way based on observing Ellis' responses to my various tactics, but the improvement has been tremendous.I think the key things I tried to achieve was to get Ellis to see the crib as a welcoming place and also to realise that when I leave her to sleep I'm not abandoning her.

It took a LONG time before getting good and consistent results - from the time I last blogged about this topic till now. PU/PD can go on for a good 2 hours and I've had to endure marathon crying sessions in between but things are SO much better now.

Some things I tried that seemed to help:

+ Darkening her room
+ Closing her room door instead of leaving it ajar
+ Singing to her - amazing results. Really calms her down.
+ Talking to her - this seems to help calm and soothe her.
+ Not going to check on her immediately if I hear her cry, especially when she wakes after 45 minutes of sleep. Unless it's a distress call, I monitor and wait for 5 minutes. Many times she's been able to put herself back to sleep.
+ Sometimes if she's still crying after the routine, on those days that I know she's tired but just can't seem to sleep, I take 5. I walk out of her room (after reassuring her I'll check in on her in 5 minutes) and go do something else - laundry, etc. I monitor the crying - many times it just winds down in less than 5 minutes and she falls asleep.
+ It's almost impossible to make her fall asleep by rocking or holding her if she's worked herself up to a hysterical crying mood. So I try to distract her using a toy to calm her down first. When she's calm then I work on getting her to settle down to sleep.

Sleep

The whole nap/sleep thing with Ellis has improved tremendously.

It's taken some sacrifice on our part -scheduling outings around her nap times and no longer staying out at night (either early dinners out or we eat in) so she can routinely go to bed by 830pm.

Now she (almost daily) naps 3 times in the day - 10am, 1 pm and 3 or 4pm for 40 minutes to an hour, and is in bed around 8 or 830pm. She can sleep all the way till 7.30 the next morning, occasionally waking up once in between. That usually happens when she's lost her pacifier which helps her to sleep. So we pop it back and she's off to la la land again. After enduring a couple nights of discomfort with engorgement, my milk supply has regulated so I don't need to pump during the night. Which is great because finally, I can get a straight 7 to 8 hours of sleep!

The whole sleep training process happened quite randomly. It wasn't any particular method that worked - but I found that if I sucessfully got her down for one nap, the subsequent one was easier, and so on and so forth. Things just improved gradually over time. Routine was one of the most important aspects, I feel - making sure the naps occured around the same time each day and watching for sleep cues (rubbing of eyes, crankiness etc).

We started with the cry-it-out method but it didn't work too well because she could go on for 2 hours without letting up. I found her crying really jarring on my nerves and worse, once that happened, any subsequent naps were impossible - she would somehow work herself up into such a frenzy that she couldn't settle down for any further naps.

Now I rock/hold her to help her to sleep which takes about 20 minutes. With the help of a pacifier, I can then put her down for a nap in her cot. This was previously impossible as she would struggle and cry the minute she hit the mattress. I decided I'd rather spend some time doing this and get 1 hour of uninterrupted me-time and a rested and happy baby rather than dealing with 2 hours of screaming, crying and a super cranky baby at the end of it.

Starting Sleep Training

I feel so behind on my blogging. There are a host of subjects/things that I wanted to put down on the blog, and now it's all backed up. It's a challenge to put things down in limited frames of time. Nowadays, being able to read through and edit my post is a bit of a luxury.

Too few photos of late - that certainly needs to be rectified. But let's move on to other things.

Sleep training continues - now I understand why the whole sleep issue is such a big thing with parents. I would rank sleep training and breastfeeding as the 2 biggest concerns in my journey as a parent so far.

I never thought about a routine - I just assumed babies would sleep as and when they needed to and that the only training required was weaning them off night feeds so that they would sleep through the night.


Right now, she's doing a nap in the morning - about 4 days running so far. I've made a concerted effort to get her to sleep after about 2 hours of wakefulness. Afternoon naps are a little tougher - I can see that she's sleepy but just fights sleeping. Which is terrible because the lack of rest makes her cranky and it's just a vicious cycle thereafter. Currently, nights are erratic. Sometimes it's quite easy, and other times it's tough - she just refuses to be put down, crying in her crib. Which is strange because sometime back for about a period of 2 weeks I managed to get her to fall asleep pretty much around 7nish in the evening and she would wake up for just 1 feed in between, lasting all the way till the next morning.

We decided we couldn't do the cry it out method - so I've taken to being in the room as she cries, comforting her by patting and talking and singing to her, avoiding picking her up. It seems to have worked for the last 2 nights, but I had to be there around 30 minutes each time before she would give in to her sleepiness and doze off.

The Girl Who Still Doesn't Sleep (part II)

I'm looking back at my last post and amazed that it actually sounds coherent, given the state I was in when I typed it. Today was another bad day. I am feeling a little better now because the bub, at 5.30pm has finally succumbed to sleep and is knocked out on her bouncy chair.

Last night was a horror - she finally slept at around 10.30 pm even with the lack of sleep the night before. Woke up at 1.30, 2.30 and 6am. This is totally not normal for her. The 2.30 round kept me up 45 mins because she was wide eyed and bushy tailed and didn't look anywhere near sleep. This left me sleep deprived and grumpy this morning, with a throbbing headache at the back of my right eye socket to boot.

Her crying and squirming started around 9-ish in the morning. I dragged both of us to Great World in a bid to get her to sleep. She did briefly, and was in a pretty good mood from the time we got back till around lunch time, although she did not sleep.

Tried to get her to sleep from 1pm to 4pm. She would again, fall asleep in my arms but cry each time I put her on the bed. From 4pm I could take it no longer - chucked her in her crib and tried to get some shut eye - really needed to be away from her for a while - I seriously thought I was going to suffer a nervous breakdown. Couldn't sleep from all the crazy & terrible thoughts coursing through my brain (& the violent screaming in the background), so finally got up to go check on her - still crying of course.

The minute I picked her up, she stopped crying and was all jolly and smiley (!!!), with nary a tear on her face.

And despite my deeply dark and ugly mood, something amazing happened - I smiled. I actually managed a laugh out loud. I couldn't believe it - one little grin from the girl and everything was right as rain again. I think I laughed because I couldn't believe what a sucker I was. As I'm sure I will be again the next time this happens.

No pictures, although I know I'm very behind. This is about all I can manage for now.

The girl who doesn't sleep

Blogging has been slow - Ellis has turned out to be one of those do-not-nap-in-the-day babies. On top of that, she hates to be put down, meaning that I have to carry her most of the time. I'm happy if she's willing to sit quietly in her bouncy chair, or play on her own in her activity mat. Precious moments are when I have two hands all to myself, baby free. Of course, I can always put her down to free up my hands, but it means an earful of screaming and wailing. And the girl is stubborn. I let her cry it out several times - she can go on crying almost nonstop for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. I'm sure she can go on for longer but I couldn't bear the noise beyond the 2 hour mark. She also lost her voice in the process, so she sounds like a croaky frog now.

The good days are the ones where she is able to nap (rare) - yesterday she fell asleep twice in my arms, and actually managed to continue sleeping when I put her in her bouncy chair, but this lasted no more than 10 minutes. The amazing ones are when she can nap more than an hour but this has happened maybe only 2 times. More likely than not, the minute I slide her away from my chest (once she has fallen asleep) onto the bed, chair etc, she starts to stir, her face scrunches up and I know the inevitable wailiing will start UNTIL I pick her up.

The one respite is when we go out. Most times, she sleeps outside and is less cranky than when she's home. Perhaps she's bored at home.

The good bit - and thankfully there is one - is that she gets drowsy in the evening so I tried to work out a bedtime routine for her. It started off quite nicely - I would nurse and put her to bed around 8pm and she managed to sleep throughout with one feed in between. On occasion she can sleep from 8pm to 8am all the way without a feed. Nowadays she won't nap in the day, and sleeps anytime from 9 to 10pm with one feed in between. Last night was the worst. She didn't sleep till 5vish in the a.m. ......