I've heard it said that nothing quite prepares you for being a parent. Is that ever true.
My son, Shae Ferdinand Jase Bowen was born at 2:27 a.m. on Jan. 19, 2012. He was just a wee guy, only 5 lb, 6 oz. Now at five weeks old and weighing close to 9 lb., I can't imagine if he had been bigger! But he sure plans to be a big boy it would seem by his dramatic weight gain. And with big growth, it should only make sense that there are some big changes happening in his little body that are giving him a great deal of trouble in the sleep department.
Up til four weeks, I had what is called an "Angel" baby. My friend Amanda refers to them as slugs because all they do for the first bit is sleep, eat and poop. The frequent feedings at night were plenty to keep me fatigued on the best of days. But then we hit week four and things changed. My Angel baby has trouble staying asleep longer than 30 minutes! I blame myself. You see, I introduced "the pacifier" to him this last week in the attempt of getting a little routine going. I read in a book that you want to enable babies to develop their own self-soothing mechanism. If you normally send them to dreamland via the breast, they're always going to need that boob to get to sleep. So the solution? If they've already had their feeding and they aren't sleeping yet, instead of popping the boob into their anxious to "suck their way to dreamland" little mouth, give them the pacifier. Because the theory is that they'll suck enthusiastically for six or so minutes and fade off and the soother will fall out before they become comatose. Eventually, they won't even need it to fall asleep. Sounds good right? Well somewhere along the way, that logic backfired or I misapplied it, but Shae can't keep the soother in his mouth oftentimes for more than a minute at which point he fusses for it or my boob. So what does Mommy do? Gotta help the poor little man so she puts it back in his eager mouth and eventually, he would pop it out and sleep away. At least for the first two or three days... Now, the soother holds a power over my little boy's mind. Without it, there is no peace, no sleep, no ease, neither for him or Mommy. The result is this: when he does finally drift off after what is usually at least an hour of dedicated watching and saying "shhhhhh, shhhhh," he wakes up after 20-30 minutes, realizing his soother is gone!
As you can imagine, nap time has become an all day, all encompassing task in which both Mother and baby get more and more frustrated. My poor Shae gets more and more overtired and I get more and more frustrated and anxious.
Oh and that routine I was trying to put him on? Help him to sleep in his own bed, persevere, use key words to lull him to sleep, we'll have to get back to that in a month or so. For now, I just need him to sleep period, I don't care anymore where or how for the time being.
