ILX Parenting 5: I'm a big kid now

the faux poop followed by the real thing AFTER being changed, i mean

side note: it pleases me so much that you a tera seem to be thoroughly enjoying August. makes me want my own new baby

faux poop!

K does her best pooping with the diaper off, no doubt.

well we all do

sleep still not going so well. I think at 3 mos we're going to try ferber. We can't co-sleep (in fact we had a bit of a scare with her falling asleep on mom the other night and a near-accident), and she's getting to bed very late and then is tired throughout the day, as is mom. Not good for anyone really.

the frustrating thing I'm finding the more I read is that people on every side of the sleep debate seem to make exaggerated claims based on a lot less "research" than they make it seem, and sometimes just based on hunches or stuff that sounds good. Our pediatrics practice is run by Michel Cohen, author of The New Basics, and advocate of cry-it-out sleep-training at two months. Based on what? Well it turns out he got "testimonials" from parents who tried it! But then a lot of the attachment parenting websites hysterically exaggerate "research" and make it sound like sleep-training a child is going to lead to brain damage, nervous disorders, wars, famines, plagues, etc. One commonly cited "Harvard study" is actually just an article by two Harvard psychologists that was not actually a study at all but based on the authors' feelings and a single experiment of sorts of letting Kenyan mothers watch and comment on videos of American mothers' responses to their babies (the Kenyan mothers disapproved, therefore the American mothers are bad).

My friend just gave me a book called "Go the F**k to Sleep" and I thought of you. It is all about a parent's frustration.

haha we have been doing the "only wipe for poo" method out of.... sheer laziness

Pee is actually sterile or something, isn't it? Like it actually cleans them.

If you're using a jellyfish as a diaper, then yes.

(you're right hurting. it doesn't hurt them as much as you'd think, but that doesn't mean you want to hire R. Kelly as your babysitter.)

hurt them?? god if pee hurt babies we'd have gone extinct several million years ago

Gotta say that none of the babies from even ten years ago are still around today.

Ok I need to say some words about the good though, because the sleep fussiness is really exclusively a nighttime issue. She has become INCREDIBLY engaging lately. She smiles, laughs, kicks her legs frantically, makes vaguely talky noises, and is generally a lot of fun and very calm during the day. She loves the light from the window, and she will watch me spin her mobile and "ask" me to keep doing it (by flailing her arms and legs) for -- well I have done it for half an hour and never reached her limit. She also greatly enjoys her nightly bath, which I try to give her after work when I'm not too tired. She's also friggin huge -- 96th percentile height and weight, too big for size one diapers at under 11 weeks, already wearing 6-9 month clothing.

AWWWWWWWW she sounds dreamy :)

Infant clothing sizes are crazy (like 0-3 never fit my son, 3-6 for like 2 months, and 6-9 until maybe 5 or 6 months) although they do begin to stabilize by the end of the first year I found.

I think it's a scam.

Hurting did you get a miracle blanket? i will buy you one if i have to.

Yes, we have a few miracle blankets, but she struggled mightily in them, and now she's kind of outgrown them. She does better in a halo sleep sack, and mostly we find that arms-in doesn't work for her anymore. Last night she actually fell asleep earlier (went down for about 20-30 minutes at 8pm, woke up, went back down for good at maybe 9:30). We're really trying to just keep pushing the bedtime routines and the naps until we get to the point (if we do) of sleep training, sort of laying the groundwork, as it were. Maybe it's starting to work.

Yeah my son was done with swaddling by 3-4 months. He would break free in the middle of the night and then scream mightily until we re-swaddled him and then struggle to break free again. This (combined with him outgrowing it) precipitated the move from co-sleeper to crib at four months and then sleep training soon after.

If used correctly baby cant escape the miracle blanket. But I agree, most swaddling products are absolute shite.

I learned way way too late with beatrice not to worry so much about training. any kind that involves a regiment anyway (sleep, food etc). my mantra became 'and this too shall pass' and of course it always did. very quickly too.

"If used correctly baby cant escape the miracle blanket."

Believe me babies can escape the miracle blanket. We swaddled him with the miracle blanket AND another swaddle and he still broke free.

OTM

yikes, i think we are seeing the first signs of a diaper rash. and yep unless august is still in a milk high, she will kick out of her swaddling blanket or kick the sheet off her, i think she just likes kicking though.

i am on the verge of saying fuck off to Medicaid, fuck off to insurance and fuck off to hospitals and health care providers, and its sad because i dont want to feel this way but they keep disappointing me. today we took august for her first check up and after they drew blood which made both tera and i cry, which were ok with, it was hard but needs to be done. when we were finished and about to schedule our next appointment for vaccines we explain that i travel for my work and we probably will not be in this area then. the manger at this clinic then told us if we dont follow through with the next appointment it will give us a red flag with Medicaid, that even if we make an appointment in a different city it will be a red flag that we arent caring for our baby, she then told us that traveling with the baby is always terrible for the baby and puts her health at great risk. she went on the list every possible problem we will expose the baby to, which tera and i both calmly listened to while i was boiling. i mean all i do is research what is best for our baby and learn what each step of her growth and development means and how to best meet her needs. i didnt even want to bring her out of the house today because it was a chilly wet day, but i wanted her to have her check up. again and again doctors and nurses continue to scare and try to force us into doing things that we are unsure of and then threaten us when she try to talk about what is happening. i really want to tell the federal goverment to stay out of our rearing our baby, i have money and just ay out of pocket for everything, but again that is frowned upon and is a red flag! what is a red flag anyway? sorry to rant.

am i just being stubborn, i havent always viewed health care this way, but i feel like i keep getting pushed around and left with very little options.

ugh, I'm sorry dude. I don't know the answers to your insurance questions, but many have been the times when, as a parent, some aspect of the US healthcare system has pissed me the hell off.

I'm not sure if it's a problem of insurance. We signed up for Medicaid in case we had to go to the hospital to help cover the cost. My insurance only covers so much, and somehow Medicaid was assigned as our primary coverage, and that combined with attempting a home birth and Tera being hispanic, the people at the hospital have treated us poorly. We decided to see the same doctor who cared for August in the hospital because we thought consistency would be nice, but a lot of the problems we had followed us. We were assigned to go to a minority clinic because in order to see the same doctor we had to be a Medicaid patient.

sounds like this guy was bein a dick basically

Which guy? I thought it was the manager that was saying this awful stuff. Agree they sound like a terrible person. I can't stand people who spend their time trying to terrify new parents.

Yeah, I have semi checked it out, spoke to someone in health and human services, who had not heard of this. Going to make a call on Monday to get more details. But the woman who made these claims regarding Medicaid and travel did insert her own disclaimer when she said twice,"Now these are just tips and advice I am giving you." When I heard that I became suspicious and annoyed.

oh for some reason i thought it was a guy. anyway ugh.

finally at that point where you find something to do on the night you have a babysitter instead of getting a babysitter for that night you had something you wanted to do

So we're stuck with sleep again. Basically we had continued to have a situation where K was basically calm and happy most of the day, rarely cried, and was alright about naps, but would not fall asleep and got extremely, extremely upset and fussy at night. We tried soothing to sleep, rocking to sleep, we had a bedtime routine, we swaddled, white noise, pretty much every tip. We tried a pacifier but it would just fall out after ten minutes and she'd wake up and cry again.

Eventually it got to the point where she wouldn't even fall asleep on H some nights (which, even when she did, was not such a good thing as H was so tired that K almost fell off her one night). We despaired, and we finally decided to try sleep training at about 11 weeks -- it felt early, but K is a very big and developed baby and literally nothing was working, and K was only falling asleep very late from exhaustion after hours of sleep/wake/cry battles, and not getting enough sleep.

So we did a Ferber-type method, intervals of crying followed by coming in to console. This may have been a mistake as she may be too young to respond the way Ferber intends or too young to understand the coming and going. But for several nights it seemed like it was working really well -- she'd cry for maybe a total of 20 minutes (which feels awful, believe me, but is much less than I've heard from other parents), fall asleep, wake up once more maybe 40 minutes later, and then fall asleep after a shorter time. The crying gradually lessened, and she started sleeping longer stretches -- she'd wake up once or maybe twice to feed during the night and we'd feed her, but she started getting 10-11 hours a night of sleep, which is what she needs.

But then we hit a wall. After more than a week, she'd still cry every time we put her down and that wasn't lessening. We started to be unable to take having to not respond to her crying for such a long stretch, even 10-15 minutes. Last night was maybe night 10 or 11 and we panicked and started soothing her again, which only seemed to make things worse. No idea what to do now. We may have started this thing too early, but it seemed like none of the other tips we had gotten were working and no one could give us an answer.

It may be that there's nothing that will help but it'd be worth taking a look here http://www.isisonline.org.uk/ info on how infants sleep, and on studies on sleep training etc.

Sounds pretty horrid for the three of you. Have you tried/looked at the 'no cry sleep solution'?

Yeah, we have the No Cry book. It doesn't strike me as a method so much as a bunch of tips, many of which seem to fail. The good news is that in spite of the crying bouts, K continues to seem quite happy, engaged and warm throughout the day. I'm hoping that maybe this is just something that will work itself out as long as we continue to generally encourage good sleep habits, have a bedtime routine, regular naps, etc.

Maybe we expected too much too soon. Overall, she sleeps decent stretches, eats well and seems happy. We were concerned from watching friends who never sleep trained and (as a result?) had kids who continued to share the bed into toddlerdom and had very late bedtimes and seemed tired during the day.

The one thing we agreed we will not do, though, is go full-blown Cry-It-Out (basically letting them cry at naps, cry at night, cry when they wake up, etc. until they just stop). I don't understand that method -- how do you know if something is ever actually wrong if you always let them cry?

Doesn't it kind of seem like she just doesn't want to be alone? Does there have to be a scheduled age/phase for "getting over it"?

I'm sorry, I've forgotten some of the details of this unhappy saga, and if I were you or H I'd be losing my mind right now--I just can't remember if you didn't want to co-sleep or it didn't work, or something.

I'm probably going to be one of those parents with a toddler in their bed (actually, as she's now walking I guess she is a toddler!), though she does go to bed at c.7pm, it's just that I feed her to sleep and go up to feed her back to sleep whenever she wakes up! A started falling asleep on his own about 12-13 months, when he started nursery and couldn't be fed to sleep there. M starts nursery in a few weeks so we'll see what happens.

for us the key to better sleep was feeding whenever the kids woke up during the night. invariably that would solve things. for the first I dunno three months or so we tried all kinds of other solutions---swaddling, rocking, singing, & so on---but the only thing that worked consistently was feeding upon wake ups. I think we did end up having each of them in our bed for decent stretches, particularly as there were disruptions, guests visiting, travel etc, which destabilize whatever setup you're trying to establish.

now things remained bad-ish until they were four years old or so, but in different ways: just waking up once or twice a night because they needed something, to be covered up, or a drink, or comfort after a nightmare. that shit wears on you too, & I'm glad my wife is only going back to work now after our kids are past that point b/c she was sleep deprived for almost a decade. (the kids still only ask for her in the middle of the night; I'd help if I were wanted! but nighttime remains mom time)

Yeah we do feed when she wakes up, and the thing is she sleeps FINE at night, once she actually goes to sleep. The only issue is getting her to go to sleep to begin with.

In re co-sleeping -- we weren't comfortable putting K between us on our full mattress because we were too concerned about harming her. We keep her in a "co-sleeper" next to the bed -- it's basically a bassinet with mesh on one side, so she sees/smells/hears us. However, we put her to bed before she goes to sleep, so she may have a thing about being alone at night. This was also another reason we weren't sure about co-sleeping, because we'd be putting her in the bed alone anyway.

yeah getting them to go to sleep is brutal. are you trying to get to go to sleep at some fixed time each night? is there a set routine for that: first a bath, then reading, then quiet snuggles, then quiet? etc?

Yes. We instituted a 7pm bedtime, and we pretty much do the same thing pre-bedtime every night (actually I should say my wife does, as I'm often not home from work yet) -- 6pm bath, massage (yes, massage), a book, feed, cuddle, bed. She often starts to get cranky before it's even time to put her down, btw, even while being cuddles.

have you played around with bedtime? Also how long does it take? Sounds like she's overtired before you're ready to put her down. Is she being fed to sleep/almost sleep then put in her co-sleeper? We didn't co-sleep with A but I still fed him to sleep.

wonder if that's too early, then? like maybe she's not tired yet?

I was pretty resistant to pushing bedtime back at first b/c that was "our time" but things often go smoother the more exhausted they are

have things ever been easier, though? like we found sleep issues worsened around growth spurts or especially cognitive spurts. maybe that's the present bad stretch?

Ah, just seen it takes an hour. Might be worth trying to cut out some of the bedtime routine to get it shorter, if you haven't already tried that

No it's been problematic all along.

Initially (but before we started sleep-training) we were doing a later bedtime -- I think we were feeding on demand but our "cutoff" was like 9pm. She would always cluster feed and cry a lot before we put her down. If we put her down fully asleep she'd usually wake up within 15-20 minutes. If not, she'd usually cry when we put her down. She did seem to have some stomach discomfort at the time, which may have since subsided.

I'm considering trying later than 7pm though, like maybe 7:30/8. I really am not overly concerned about having "our time" at this point. If I knew that rocking K for half an hour and putting her down at 9 would mean she'd stay asleep and not fuss for another hour or two I'd gladly do it.

xp hmm shorter bedtime routine is an interesting idea, may try that. Maybe there's too much buildup to bed.