Nursing Your Kids

Since moving him to his brand new room just under two weeks ago Sam has slept through the night all but two of those nights. For those of you counting (me) that’s 11 out of 13 nights. Starting the night before we moved him he slept through the night as well (12 out of 14) and in addition, putting the little guy to bed has been easy. Aside from one night when I went up one more time after he called from the gate and one night when my parents babysat and put him to bed and he came downstairs (they didn’t think the gate was important!!!) he’s gone to bed after a few stories without complaint each night.

I haven’t lost my memory completely. I know that Sam’s sleep habits have always gone in phases, both good and bad. I doubt that this wonderful stage that so perfectly coincides with the end of my pregnancy will last. With Sam, all good sleep is bound to come to an end sooner or later, and since the baby will be a huge disruption to our household and our lives I imagine this good sleep stage will come to an end as soon as this baby drops.

He’s also pretty much stopped napping. Car naps have been sporadic at best (one on Saturday and one yesterday) and napping in his room just won’t happen. He obviously still needs the naps, but I don’t know what to do to help him take them. He’s willing to lie down and rest for a while reading stories when the car naps fail, but the sleep won’t come. I am exhausted when Bob gets home.

But he’s sleeping through the night. Some nights I’ve slept through the entire night for eight whole hours. Other nights I’ve gotten up to use the bathroom and I’ve been able to go right back to sleep without having to spend 15 minutes to an hour soothing an angry toddler later.

The best thing about Sammy’s new room is that when he wakes up in the morning he doesn’t start screaming for me immediately. He plays. He actually wakes up and plays. I hear his little voice talking to his trains and the trains running around the tracks. Some days I hear him reading his books to himself. I can go back to sleep and doze for half an hour some mornings hearing him enjoying his books and toys. It’s lovely waking up to a child in a good mood.

After a long, long stretch of shitty bedtime habits we’re back to a somewhat normal going to bed routine. I don’t know what changed, or how it changed, but somehow Sam started acting like a reasonable human being at bedtime. For the last week or so after his bath, brushing teeth and a few stories I’ve been able to turn out the light, lay down with him for a few minutes, kiss him good night and leave. Usually when I start to climb over the gate in his doorway he’ll call for me and I’ll tell him where I’m going and to lie down and go to sleep. He’s complied every single night.

Sometimes I tell him I’m going to feed the cat. Other times I’ve told him I have to go fold laundry. One night I told him I was going downstairs to clean up the dinner dishes. Each night he’s just accepted it and gone to sleep. One night Bob put him to bed and didn’t have the same luck I did. Sam didn’t freak out, he just called for us quietly from the gate in his door. I went in to lay down with him for a few minutes and he was asleep in no time at all.

Tonight he was restless when I was cuddling with him. He was playing with his trains and talking. I told him that I had to go fold laundry. He said, “Oh. Okay.” I asked if I should go or if he wanted me to stay for a little while longer. He told me to go. I did, and he quietly fell asleep.

I don’t know what happened, what switch was turned. I don’t know how long it will last. All I know is that it almost makes up for his almost nightly 3 am wakeups.

Since last Wednesday, Sam has slept through the night exactly once. I don’t know why he’s waking and I don’t know how to make it stop. He wakes up, goes to the gate in his doorway and calls for either Bob or me. There’s no rhyme or reason to the parent he picks and he’s usually pretty specific about who he will accept. One night he woke up calling for Dada. I woke up and got up to use the bathroom. He heard me cough and wailed, “Uh-uh! Mama back in bed. Dada! Dada carry.” Some nights he’s more agreeable to the other parent stepping in, and will allow a substitute, but that’s usually after several minutes of screaming for the other parent at the top of his lungs, which means everyone’s awake and unhappy.

I wish I knew what to do. He could be having nightmares or it could be something else. Aside from the wake ups, which are generally pretty brief, he sleeps for about ten hours a night. He’s been napping pretty consistently for 2-3 hours (yes, still in the car) so he’s not especially overtired with 12 or 13 hours total sleep each day. I know it’s not night terrors, since he’s lucent and fairly agreeable to getting back into bed as soon as one of us goes to get him. He also falls asleep pretty quickly once we’re in there, and though I’d prefer not to get into bed with him it certainly makes it easier for me since he quiets immediately and goes right back to sleep.

If this next child isn’t a sleeper I don’t know what I’ll do.

For those of you keeping track, things have gotten better in the sleep department. By night four of our return to sleep training Sam cried at the gate for a little over 15 minutes- after 10 we put him back into bed and he promptly climbed out and returned to crying at the gate. But after a few short minutes more he climbed back into bed and went to sleep. By night five, he only cried for about 10 minutes. He was quiet before we returned to his room. Each night after I held my breath, waiting, and each night he was in bed before we had to put him back in. Last night, his cries weren’t even cries at all. They were just sad, sweet little requests. “Dada? Dada carry. Dada. Mama. Mama, take the gate off.” He was asleep before the ten minutes were up.

He isn’t sleeping through the night every night, but he’s sleeping through most nights and he doesn’t sound as angry when he wakes. He’s been sleeping a bit later in the morning too, which is just lovely for me since I love to sleep in. I think he’s finally starting to fully catch up on sleep. The cycle of sleep deprivation is coming to an end. For now, anyway.

This type of sleep training was a last resort for us. I don’t like letting Sam cry and aside from a few sleep deprived moments of my own, when I let him cry because I was just to frustrated with the crying to deal with him, we never let him cry until he was over a year old. Even after that we tried most other methods of getting him to sleep before we’d resort to letting him cry (or self-soothe, as the “experts” call it.) But bedtime routines weren’t working, rocking wasn’t working, staying with him while he fell asleep wasn’t working and co-sleeping wasn’t working. He was sleep deprived and we were miserable. We took a chance, tried something I didn’t want to try, and so far it’s working.

Knowing Sam and his sleep cycles, I’m sure it won’t last forever and I fully expect a return to sleep hell once the new baby arrives, but until then it’s nice to have two hours in the evening when we’re not arguing with a toddler about bedtime and we can finally watch the Netflix movies that have been collecting dust on our shelves.

It pains me to think about sleep training, let alone be in the house when it happens, but the truth is that even though he cried for two hours the first night and one hour the second night, Sam slept straight through both nights without waking. This morning I woke up before he did.

About an hour after we left his room last night, Sam decided that he’d had enough, got into bed and went to sleep. He didn’t cry the entire hour and he didn’t cry nearly as much as he did the first night. He stood at the gate in his doorway for a while and talked about Thomas and Percy and James. Every ten minutes Bob went in, put him back in bed and left. Sam protested when he left, but didn’t scream like he did the night before. He cried mostly while he demanded that we take the gate off.

I don’t know what tonight will be like. We had a pretty good day, the three of us. We bummed around the house most of the morning then went to the post office. Bob went for a haircut and Sam and I went to play with the train table at Barnes and Noble for a while. Sam napped and Bob and I worked around the house. After Sam’s nap we worked for a bit longer while Sam played then the three of us went out to celebrate our wedding anniversary at a local restaurant that features a kids meal happy hour. Sam surprised me by eating just about everything on the table, from onion rings to my Thai turkey salad, even asking for lettuce.

Back at home we watched a bit of Thomas, played with toys, then got ready for bed. Sam and I brushed off the food from his teeth, picked out the color diaper he wanted to wear and the pajamas. Now, just 5 minutes after Bob left his room, he’s at his gate demanding to take the blue diaper and the red pajamas off and replace them with the green diaper and the blue pajamas. I am very tired and hopeful he’ll go to sleep more easily tonight.

Life was so much easier when he would just nurse to sleep.

A few months ago, before he got sick for the first time this winter, Sam was going to sleep. We’d read a few stories, kiss him good night and leave the room. It took about a week of putting him back to bed each time he’d get and standing in the hall until he was asleep, but it worked. 6 out of 7 nights he’d go to sleep on his own. Some nights he requested more kisses. Other nights he’d ask me to lay down with him and I would for a minute or two. Then I’d get up, kiss him again and leave the room.

But then he got sick and started getting the last of his 2 year molars at the same time. He was up coughing, couldn’t breathe through the congestion and his teeth hurt. A few nights in a row he slept with us and then we moved him back to his own bed when he was feeling better. Only he wouldn’t go to sleep anymore and he wouldn’t stay asleep We’d try to leave and he’d start to cry out for us to stay. His requests for more kisses turned into angry demands. He’d tell us where to put our heads on the pillow and which side of his bed to lie down on. When he woke in the night he’d demand either mama or dada and the other parent just wouldn’t do. His screams of anger and outrage would keep us both up if the wrong person came in to put him back to bed. He became a nasty little dictator.

We went back to trying to sleep train. I say we but I mean Bob. I just don’t have it in me, especially since I’m pregnant. We started a week ago and what worked the last time, putting him back in bed each time he got out no longer works. He gave himself a black eye banging his head on his many exhausted trips in and out of bed. Bob started sitting in the room with him until he fell asleep. That process takes hours. Each time Bob got up to leave Sam would wake up, furious.

At his two year well visit we asked our pediatrician what she thought. She says he’s manipulating us and we need to start putting him to bed and letting him scream, leaving completely and coming back every 10 minutes to put him back in bed. She suggested putting a sleeping bag on the floor so he won’t bump his head getting in and out of bed.

My inclination is to just give in and go to sleep with him to avoid the hours of screaming. But Bob agrees with the pediatrician. So sleep training it is. Last night, after two hours of screaming at the gate he fell asleep on the sleeping bag on the floor. He was still sniffling and crying a little in his sleep. It kills me. We’re just going to have to do this again when the baby comes and he stops sleeping all over again. It’s been just over an hour and he’s quiet. I wonder if he’ll stay that way.

One of the things I’ve been considering for baby number two is an Arm’s Reach Co-Sleeper. When Sam was born he slept in the bassinet attachment of a pack n play next to our bed (when he wasn’t actually sleeping in our bed) for the first four or five months of his life and it was fine. But one of my complaints about the pack n play was that it wasn’t level with the bed so I had to lift him in and out of it every time he needed to nurse. That is probably why he spent so much time actually sleeping in our bed.

The Arm’s Reach Co-Sleeper looks as though it solves that problem. With the leg attachments we could make it level with our mattress, eliminating my need to stoop or bend, but looking more closely at the actual product I wonder if it makes sense at all. It looks like the fourth wall, the side that butts up against the bed, doesn’t go down completely. Based on the images from the site it seems like there’s still a partial wall which means I wouldn’t be able to just slide over and nurse, I’d still have to lift the baby from the co-sleeper and return the baby to the co-sleeper.

If that’s the case, what’s the point? Aside from being slightly more level than a pack n play what are the advantages, if any of using an actual co-sleeper? Unfortunately our crib doesn’t have a drop side. If it did, we’d be able to sidecar the crib, completely eliminating any barricade between me and baby, an idea which seems to make more sense.

Does anyone have any experience with the Arms Reach Co-Sleeper or a crib side-car that you can share?

A Utah couple recently lost their second child. Their first child died in 2003 after accidental asphyxiation while sleeping in her parent’s bed. The second child, whose cause of death was undetermined, died in the night sleeping between his parents. The couple is being charged with child-abuse homicide. According to court documents, the couple was warned against co-sleeping by their pediatrician the day before their child’s death. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Prosecutors and health officials say the case should serve as a reminder to parents to put their kids to bed in a crib, in part because studies have found connections between bedsharing and SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome.

“If you do it safely, the risks are so low. The fear is really taken out of it,” said Melissa Knighton, a Salt Lake City mother who sleeps with her 19-month-old daughter, Abigail, and uses a crib to store toys. “By just saying, ‘The child died of co-sleeping,’ that doesn’t tell us anything at all. There’s dangerous ways to crib sleep, too.”

I don’t know what to make of this. First of all, I can’t imagine the grief this family must be feeling. But I’m not sure about whether it’s right to prosecute them for parenting. I don’t know the circumstances of how they slept. I don’t know if the parents are drug or alcohol users/abusers, if they sleep in a fluffy bed full of pillows, down comforters and feather beds, if they’re obese or if they’ve just been the victims of misfortune. Without knowing more details about the sleeping arrangements it’s difficult to determine whether this was a form of child-abuse homicide.

Salt Lake County District Attorney Lohra Miller - who said she nursed her children and occasionally fell asleep, only to startle awake - said her office is not out to prosecute co-sleeping parents when deaths occur.

The couple were reportedly heavy sleepers, and advocates advise against co-sleeping in such cases.

We co-slept off and on for the first year of Sam’s life. I didn’t want to at first because I was terrified of SIDS, but nighttime nursing sessions inevitably ended up with both of us falling asleep. I’d startle awake and transfer him to the pack n play beside our bed six or seven times a night. But then I found myself startling awake to check to make sure he was breathing. If I couldn’t hear him or couldn’t feel his little chest rise and fall I’d panic and hover above him looking for signs of movement. As sleep deprivation took its toll it became easier to just adjust his swaddle and put him on his back beside me. Then I read some arguments in favor of co-sleeping.

Here are the preliminary findings based on mother-infant pairs studied in the sleep-sharing arrangement versus the solitary-sleeping arrangement (Elias 1986, McKenna 1993, Fleming 1994; Mosko 1994):

Even though these studies are being conducted in sleep laboratories instead of the natural home environment, it’s likely that within a few years enough mother-infant pairs will be studied to scientifically validate what insightful mothers have long known: something good and healthful occurs when mothers and babies share sleep. (read the full article at Dr. Sears’ website)

Dr. Sears and other co-sleeping advocates made me feel better about my choice to keep Sam in bed beside me. We took all precautions, making sure that no pillows or blankets were close to Sam and always placed him on his back. Nighttime wakings were frequent, but rolling over to nurse became second nature and I no longer had to fully awaken. When he started sleeping for longer, six-hour stretches when he was about four or five months old we moved him to a crib in his own room, next door to ours. Each night when he’d wake up to nurse I’d bring him into bed with me where he’d stay until morning. We kept this arrangement up until he was close to a year old and no longer slept well in bed beside me.

I truly believe that co-sleeping is beneficial for mothers and babies when done safely.

The research on bedsharing and infant death is mixed. A 2005 study of SIDS deaths in Scotland found the largest risk occurred when parents slept with infants on a couch and when the baby was less than 11 weeks old. Other studies have found a higher risk of SIDS with infants of low birth weights, among mothers who smoked, among parents have consumed alcohol or are overtired.

Supporters of co-sleeping often cite James McKenna, director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame. He says a blanket admonishment is simplistic and confuses “normal, healthy human behavior” with pathology.

I’m sure that co-sleeping is dangerous if you’re drunk or stoned or on a soft, fluffy couch. But for the parents who aren’t reckless, for parents who sleep together with their child mindfully and safely, co-sleeping allows for a good night’s sleep and provides bonding time for working parents who don’t always have the luxury of spending time with their baby during the day.

To sleep safely with your child:

For more information on co-sleeping safely, the benefits of co-sleeping and the risks, Sleeping with Your Baby is an excellent resource.