I feel like a new woman. Lincoln is finally on a sleep schedule. Mind you that in no way means that he is sleeping through the night without waking up, but he is sleeping at night. He has been a fairly decent sleeper since he came home. The problem was he would scream every night for about 2 hours straight (we figured it was just colic) then fall asleep for an evening cat nap. Then he would wake up after about 45 minutes and be awake until around midnight. The other problem was that he would wake up in the middle of the night and want to play for a couple of hours. His sister pulled this trick on us until she was about 8 months old. It was exhausting even back then with just one child. Of course right about the time Lincoln was ready to go to sleep, the other two kids would wake up and it was time to start the day on very little sleep. Oh, I hate that feeling of needing to wake up to be with the kids, but feeling like you would give anything for just for 1 more hour (or even 5 more minutes) of sleep.
A couple of friends (thank you Sarah and Melodi) told me about a book called
Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child. What an amazing book. It is so right on, at least for our family. Basically what it says is that your baby should never be up for more than about two hours. At first I thought this was crazy, but I noticed he was right. At about 2 hours Lincoln would start getting fussy and then would get overtired and have a problem sleeping. He also says that after I think it was the first 3 months you should be able to put your baby to sleep around 7pm and have them sleep about 12 hours only waking for feedings. Then they should go back to sleep about 2 hours later for a morning nap, take an early afternoon nap, and a late afternoon nap and back to bed at 7pm. "Yeah right" I said. "our baby won't go to sleep until about 11pm and then has to wake up in the middle of the night for play time". Lincoln was right on target for his morning naps, but I didn't think that bedtime would ever work out. In order to get him taking the regular daytime naps I did find that I had to let him "cry it out" a little. I know that this method doesn't work for everyone, but it works like a charm for me. If I didn't let him cry for ten minutes or so to fall asleep on his own, he would end up crying for hours while I held him. That didn't make any sense to me. Daytime naps were working so well that I decided to try his method in the evening at 11 weeks (a little earlier than the book says, but what the heck). Basically all I did was when he starts getting fussy in the evening which was around 9pm the first night, I put him in his
Amby Bed and let him cry/fuss until he fell asleep. It took about 15 minutes the first time, but again that was better than the 2 hours he usually spend crying at night. It worked. Now I needed to keep him asleep. I decided that when he woke up to eat I would feed him and put him back down even if he didn't seem tired. I would let him cry for about 20 minutes and then take him out if he wasn't asleep by then. I tried it and within 1o minutes of crying he was back to sleep for 4 more hours. That has been the last times he has cried or tried to play in the middle of the night. Even if he seems pretty awake after a nighttime feeding, I just put him back down in his bed and he may fuss a little for a couple of minutes but that is it. Our little guy is so much happier now that he is sleeping well (and so am I). We don't have the 2 hour crying sessions every night and he doesn't need to be held all of the time anymore. Life is good and I am starting to see the light at the other end of the
loooong baby tunnel. So, a shout out and big thank you to Marc
Weissbluth who wrote the most useful parenting book of them all.
Family Picture
Jack
Allie
Lincoln
Yesterday we came home from dropping Allie off at lab school and Jack went into the back yard to play for a few minutes before nap time while I fed the baby. All of a sudden he heard some lawnmowers start up behind us. The family that lives there has a lawn service that comes once a week. He loves watching and listening to the sounds of the lawnmowers and blowers out there. He seriously sat on that swing for about 30 minutes until I finally had to bring him in for a nap. We used to have some neighbors who owned a very successfully lawn service of their own. In fact, it was so successful that last year they moved on up and out of our neighborhood. The husband had a very large truck with a license plate that read "lawn man". I wonder if Jack was contemplating his future as a lawn man.
Notice the cool shoes he is wearing. He is quite fashion forward.
The only problem with Lincoln's new and amazing sleep schedule is that he was sharing a room with Adam and I along with Adam's office/music room. I think I'll just start calling our bedroom "the multipurpose room". This meant that Adam wasn't able to be in there to get his work done at night which he really needs to do if he's ever going to graduate. The obvious thing to do would be to put Allie and Jack in a room together and Lincoln would have his own room. The problem with that is when we have tried that (and we have tried it several times now) the kids don't go to bed until midnight because they are to busy being crazy in there together and then they wake each other up at 6am. Let's be honest, I need sleep and that is about the only need that I have in my life, so Allie and Jack sharing a room doesn't work at this point in the game. Adam and I decided last night that since we don't have a walk in closet and our master bathroom is too small for Lincoln's bed, his new room will have to be the pantry. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I guess at least he'll never go hungry. Luckily his bed (it's not a crib or pack-n-play, it's an Amby Bed) fits perfectly in there. That bed has really come in handy. We got it at a consignment shop for Jack, to help with his horrible reflux and now Lincoln is making great use of it. It's a good thing that even though I didn't get as much cleaned/organized during Spring Break as I wanted to, I did get the pantry cleaned out.
