The DeCook Family Adventures: Nap Time??

When you have an infant, sleep is a constant topic of conversation. This applies to how much sleep the new parents are getting, and the quantity and quality of the sleep of the infant, as they are both inversely related. Todd and I feel like we have gotten very lucky with Emmett. He is a generally a "good" baby- he eats extremely well, doesn't fuss too much, likes being out in public and meeting new people and has been a pretty good sleeper at night since he was born. To quote my Aunt Julie, "You guys won the baby lottery with him." In many ways, we really have- we never have to stress about him eating enough and we have been able to work out a system so we both get a decent amount of sleep every night. However, just because he is a good baby does not mean that after 8 weeks we have completely figured each other out yet.

Before Emmett was born, I read a lot about what to expect from our baby in terms of sleeping and eating. The problem with reading a lot about this topic is that every book seems to offer a differing opinion or be ambiguous about how often your baby should sleep. Most of the literature was consistent in stating that at 8 weeks, there is no point trying to create a schedule because it won't stick until the baby is around 3-4 months. As a result, we haven't been enforcing a schedule with him but rather have been letting him call the shots on when he went down for naps and to bed at night. Typically the nights we were at home have gone something like this:

8:00 pm- bedtime
10:30 pm- feeding (Heather), then back to bed
3:30 am- feeding (Todd), then back to bed
6:30 am- feeding (Heather), then back to bed
8:30 am- feeding (Heather), then up for the morning

After 8:30 am we would pretty much wake-up and go about our day and when Emmett fell asleep he would nap. Sometimes we would let him go 3 or 4 hours without putting him down. This worked well for us, in terms of enabling us to be out of the house a lot and get things done. However, the last few weeks we noticed that one day a week we would have a cranky baby who wanted to sleep almost all day long. After a few weeks of noticing this pattern, we started trying to put him down for naps more intentionally every 2-3 hours. Most of the time he would refuse to sleep, even though he was clearly tired, unless he was cuddled up on my chest. (As sweet as this was, spending all day cuddling with my adorable baby is not the most productive use of my time.) So we called in our wonderful doula to observe his sleeping/napping patterns and help us decipher what our little guy needed.

Naturally, the day that she came to work with us was a day that was not his cranky day. That said, she almost immediately picked up on what our issue was- Emmett needed to nap A LOT more frequently. She took one look at him and told me to swaddle him and put him in his crib. I mentioned that he had escaped all forms of swaddling that we had tried. She smiled and said, "ok, then it's time for bat wings." She proceeded to add an extra layer to our swaddle to reign in his crazy little arms that he loves to swing about wildly. She then laid him in his crib and he was out!

I looked at her mystified. How did she do that? He hadn't even seemed tired! I had spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with my baby for the last 8 weeks and I did not pick up the fact that he was ready for a nap. She proceeded to explain an infant's sleep cycles to me. (Which I had read about, but had not known how to identify correctly and thus ignored.) She explained that most new parents miss many of the cue's that help identify the window for when your child is ready to go to sleep- hiccuping, sneezing, jerky limb and head movements, a blank stare at the horizon, glassy eyes and of course, eye rubbing and yawning. Based on her day with us, we now know that Emmett is running on about 1 hr 15 min cycles, meaning that is typically how long he can be awake during the day between naps. Sometimes his naps will be a half hour, sometimes they will be 2 hours but regardless of this he needs to go down when we see those cryptic little signs that he is getting sleepy. She explained that because we were missing them and his window to sleep, he was getting overly tired and stimulated making it harder for him to go to sleep because his body was in a sleep fighting mode. We have been testing her theory for the last few days, and I have to say- it works. (So does her magic bat wing swaddle- Houdini is conquered!) Our schedule at night is still the same great schedule but we have a lot more naps and a lot happier baby during the day now. Talk about feeling ill-equipped to take care of your baby! He had been trying to tell us what he needed all along and we had just been missing it.

I have been so preoccupied with Emmett's sleep patterns, that most of the photos from this week have been with my phone camera (to update Todd while he's at work), so they are really poor quality. Our little guy is now over 12 pounds and growing daily!