Thursday, January 29, 2009

Baby Whisperer Day 6: One step forward, two steps back

Last night was kind of a fiasco. Her third nap of the day didn't happen until 6 p.m., but she was so tired that it ended up just segueing directly into night sleep. Except that she went back to her old habit of waking up every hour... At around midnight, she woke up alert and babbling instead of weary and crying, so we changed her diaper, fed her some food and water, and read her bedtime books, all the while keeping things calm and mellow. She went to sleep then, but still kept up with the hourly waking. At 6 a.m. Terry took over the soothing back to sleep/PUPD and I dreamed about zombies chasing me. We got up at 7:30, and I kept her up until around 9 a.m. She ate some mushy pear and bananas with a little rice cereal mixed in. Right now Terry is trying to get her down for her morning nap and she's just not having it. We're supposed to keep trying for 40 minutes and then just let her get up, but I think she'll fall asleep soon. She's just overtired and upset right now.

My goal for today is to establish three good, solid naps so that hopefully she'll be better rested by tonight and do better.

I'm also reading another book I ordered, The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley. It's a similar approach, but allows for co-sleeping and integrates the Sears approach pretty closely, while Tracy Hogg (the Baby Whisperer) doesn't approve of Sears. Pantley offers some suggestions for co-sleeping safely that might have made it possible for me to continue doing it - you get rid of ALL the blankets, instead keeping warm by bundling up. Mom cuts openings in her pajamas/sweatshirts/parkas for nursing. Pantley says she was able to get her kids to sleep through the night in her bed with her.

I also ordered Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child but have only dipped into it. The prose style is much less engaging than the other two books - a somewhat irrelevant detail, but it does slow down reading. With Pantley and Hogg both, I felt like I was sitting down for coffee with the authors and chatting in person.

2 comments:

Rachel said...

I really liked Healthy Sleep Habits, but the writing style is terrible. I am a fast reader and it kept bogging me down. I felt like it had too much extraneous information, although I did find the references to sleep studies very interesting.

I felt like the author prefers CIO, but it worked for us since LG wasn't comforted by us holding him anyway.

Anonymous said...

I agree about the writing in Healthy Sleep Habits. It was boring, actually, so I skimmed most of it. But the timing advice really helped us.