Monday, December 19, 2005

Sleep training update - I'd give myself a "D"

The sleep training is not going so well, actually. At first, Baby would protest for 20-30 minutes before falling asleep. A couple of weeks later, she started to take maybe up to hour to fall asleep. Lately, she often vocalises for half an hour then cry for half an hour and still not sleep. And I'm just talking about naps here - naps which only last 45 minutes...

It's all my fault. I'm afraid I've been a little inconsistent. I've been offering Baby quite frequent feeds - as often as every couple of hours - in order to stop the reverse cycling. This, and her ultra-short naps, means that sometimes she feeds right before she goes to sleep. In one or two out of her four naps, she's being nursed to sleep (and one nap will be in her buggy). That's a big no-no when you're aiming independent sleep.

But I'm not going to do anything about it for at least another three days; Baby gets more jabs on Wednesday and she'll need to be, well, babied.

6 comments:

Happy and Blue 2 said...

She will grow out of this. In a few years.
Hang in there..

Violet said...

eb:Actually, I have been wondering whether it's a bad idea to work on day sleeps but not on night sleeps. She gets rocked to sleepiness most bedtimes, unless she's hungry (quite often), in which case I feed her and she'll drop off to sleep in the middle of her din-dins. I know I'm supposed to awaken her slightly when she does this, before putting her to bed, but I so hate waking her up...

Maybe you're right about sorting out her night-time sleep first.

happyandblue2: a few years? I'll have died from lack of sleep by then!

Amanda said...

I think one theory is that if you get the day time naps right night sleeping falls into place. Sleep begets sleep and all that (Weissbluth?)- but there is probably a contradictory theory out there so who knows?

We got some good long naps out of immunisations. Maybe you will too this time.

Violet said...

mtnw: As it happens, the jabs have been pushed back to next month because of a MoH directive that the 3rd MensB shot should be done at 21 weeks or later. So the fun is still to come...

Just about every book says that good daytime napping helps night time sleep and vice versa.

But Weissbluth also says that the two types of sleep are somehow separate e.g. you can use control crying for nap training and parent-assisted sleep for bedtime, without confusing the baby.

If he's to be believed, then it's okay to focus on the day sleeps only. But the other books imply that we should sort out the night sleep first and the day sleep will follow.

I just think it's harder to do this at night because we're all so tired by then...

darth said...

i think i may have commented this before, but...we NEVER figured out the sleep thing with darth jr. LOLOLOL. seriously. we just couldn't do it, and eventually just gave up and lived the catnaps and taking turns thing until he grew out of it (yeah, couple years). We look back on it now and laugh of course :D (oh, and darth jr. sleeps just fine now)

Violet said...

darth: yeah you probably have, but it's worth hearing again though. I can't help but continue in my search for the "silver bullet" to fix my sleep concerns, even if there isn't one!