sleep

A Sleep Solution

~ theantelopediaries

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I have been struggling with getting my daughter to sleep for several months. She slept great, waking up only once or twice a night, from about three months to six months. Then, at around six months, getting her to go to sleep became an issue.

Nursing her wasn’t enough. Not only did I nurse her until my breasts couldn’t take it anymore, but on top of that, sometimes she would push me away and begin crying.

Bouncing her on my knee pacified her, until my arms got tired.

We had a routine going- the baby noise that was supposed to simulate the sound of the womb, the dim light, story time, but it wasn’t working. I felt desperate. I became too emotionally involved and my husband would intervene when I let out a shrill. That was when I was at the end of my rope.

There is almost nothing worse than a crying infant that can’t go to sleep late at night. Torture at Guantanamo? They should make them listen to crying babies.

When my daughter finally fell asleep in my arms, she would wake up more than half the time when I transitioned her to her crib, and if she didn’t she would wake up within 20 minutes.

“Lose the transition,” my pediatrician said.

Her kid, she said, falls asleep by her side and she is able to do things- watch movies, work on her laptop- while her child sleeps beside her.

So I tried moving her to our family bed. I nursed her, and then when she fell asleep, moved her beside me on the big bed.

That worked better, except that I had no room on the bed for me. Our king size bed is actually made up of two extra long twins paired side by side. My husband takes up his entire side, and being 5’10”, I need my side too. Unfortunately, the little one, even though she is little, takes up the longitude of my mattress, and it only gets worse as I move away from her to have some space, and her head moves closer to me during the night, until she is a 45 degree angle on my bed, leaving me a sliver of space to rest on… sideways.

She still woke up crying at night, disturbing my husband, who has sleep issues as it is. I needed to move, and so we did- to the living room.

Every night, one of us rolls out the mattress that sits on top of our daughter’s crib. That way, we all have more room, and it worked better during the night in terms of nursing. But it didn’t solve the problem of how to get our daughter to sleep in the first place.

I still had the same troubles trying to get her to fall asleep at a decent hour, or any hour for that matter. At nine months, I tried extinction, aka the Ferber method. I let her cry for 20 minutes. It was agonizing not only for me, but for my neighbors. For the first time, I heard them banging on our mutual wall. Our experiment was over. We returned to what we normally do- let her stay up with us until she is so tired her brain gives way to sleep.

What happened the day after we tried the extinction method, however, scared the daylights out of me. Our little antelope had a hoarse voice, and it didn’t go away for several days. I thought she might have damaged her vocal chords permanently.

“Dear God,” I prayed. “Don’t let my stupidity ruin her voice.”

God was merciful. By the fifth day, her voice began returning to normal, as I remembered it. I vowed never to follow the Ferber method again.

I returned to doing the same things to help her go to sleep- holding, singing, humming, reading, nursing, playing the white noise- and expecting a different result. Finally, about a week ago, I came up with a novel solution. At least novel for me, because I haven’t heard or read anyone talk or write about it.

I don’t know why anybody hadn’t thought of this before, or if someone has, why it’s not more talked about.

During one of the nights I was exhausted from the day and not able to sleep because of my daughter, I suddenly remembered a sow I once observed a sow nursing her piglets. All the piglets were resting except one, who was fidgeting, and the sow, perhaps in exhaustion, raised her head to look at him, snorted at the piglet and then dropped her head back down. I think she pretended to be asleep because her closed eyes still twitched.

I decided to try that. Instead of snorting, I firmly told my daughter that it’s nighttime and “I’m going to sleep.” Then I lay down on the mattress and pretended to go to sleep. When my daughter wanted to nurse, I provided the goods, but my eyes remained closed.

In pretending to go to sleep, I actually did fall asleep. But when I woke up an hour or so later, my daughter was asleep, with no crying! Tonight, when I used the same technique again, I could feel my daughter pushing at me and using me as leverage to stand. When I peeked through my eyelashes, I saw her shifting about like an orangatangue, but I also saw her put her head down, buttocks up. She did this a couple times, and then, she fell asleep.

Her sleep time is still late (tonight it was 10:30), but she gets about 10 hours each night. My next task is to see if I can get her to bed earlier, so my husband and I can watch a movie or I can work on this blog, for instance.

This is a work in progress. But I am so glad she is asleep. Unless you’ve gone through it, you can only imagine how exhausting it is to be with your kid all day, and have that extra umph! to give to your child at night when they are being fussy. We need our child to go to sleep so that we can recover and be sane for the next day.

Originally written June 11, 2013.

Sometimes I Feel Like My Daughter is Trying to Kill Me

~ theantelopediaries

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Sometimes I feel like my daughter is trying to kill me.

It’s not true, of course. I don’t think she understands the concept of death and even if she did, I don’t think she would want to kill me, permanently.

At least I hope not.

But confidently, she is winning the battle.

It started with the battle over sleep. She never liked being put in her crib. She cried so painfully that the only way she would stop is if I held her or even better, lay down next to her and nursed her. She would nurse on that nipple so much that it would be sore, but just try pulling it out of her mouth when she wasn’t ready.

Sometimes she would wake up and start crying when I took the nipple out of her mouth, and the process of getting her back to sleep would start all over again.

I contemplated giving her a pacifier, but my thinking was and is that I would be replacing something natural with something artificial and that I would be neglecting my duty as a mother. Ditto for formula. I don’t see mammals in the wild using pacifiers or formulas. So when my nipple hurt, I thought of the above and reminded myself that it would be over, sooner rather than later, I hoped.

For you men out there, I don’t know what it’s like, but I can only imagine sore nipples being like sore balls. Can you imagine several times a day, sometimes at whim, someone pulling on them?

How long could you stand living like that?

For anyone who is a spouse to a breastfeeder, toast your nursing spouses!

My daughter also doesn’t like being unattended when I need to do something, like wash dishes. She cries and cries and cries. But I have to do the dishes!

My husband comes home from work and starts cooking because, well, he knows how. He doesn’t have to try to read a cookbook while a baby is crying in the background. I feel I must do the dishes and clean the kitchen.

It’s the least I can do.

But sometimes my daughter’s cries become too much for me, so I abandon the dishes until Pete comes home. He, of course, wants time for himself, but I ask him to please look after her so that I can do some chores.

Pete would like me to have dinner on the table when he comes home, and frankly I want to have dinner on the table too. But I can’t do it with Polina crying. My conscience tells me I need to attend to her.

Someone suggested that a mother reacts to a baby’s cries differently than a father. I certainly don’t know what it’s like for a father, or for other mothers. For me, it is unbearable to ignore.

The biggest battle, however, where she wounds to kill, is over the aforementioned sleep.

Her sleep is not consistent. At the first sign of tiredness, I put her in our bed. Sometimes she falls asleep, sometimes she doesn’t. Continuing to operate with a cranky child who doesn’t sleep well is torture.

A cranky child is for me the biggest birth control measure. Having sex is the farthest thought from my mind right now. I’m amazed that women can have children less than two years apart. Maybe they handle the situation differently, or get lucky with good sleepers.

Another challenge is going to the grocery store. Polina reaches for things, wants to get down and try to walk, starts crying in the shopping cart if she doesn’t get her way.

Aaaaagh! Is she trying to kill me?

Originally written May 21, 2013.

Combatting My Fear of the Dark- March 16, 2013

~ theantelopediaries

I am afraid of the dark. I have been consistently from the time I was six years old. I’m not afraid to admit it, as I honestly don’t care if people think I’m crazy. I’ve gotten to a stage in my life where I no longer worry about people liking me. So if you think I’m loony, I do understand.

What is changing is that I am reconsidering my fear of the dark when I put my daughter down to sleep in her crib. I have the same fear of the dark, but am more combative with my fears. I talk to them directly. “Leave her alone,” I say mentally. “If you come near her I’m going to kick your ass.” Then I leave a light on in the bathroom just in case. When I was younger, light represented protection. When I was left alone at home, I would turn on the lights in every room. I was still afraid and couldn’t sleep, but at least I could see and be vigilant until my parents got home. As an adult, I progressed to managing to fall asleep with the light on. The problem went away when I met my husband. When there is somebody else in the room or apartment with me- parents, roommates, friends at a slumber party- the fear is less debilitating.

My daughter, by contrast, exhibits no fear of the dark. She remains peacefully asleep as I transfer her from the boppy to her crib. Her arms fall beside her forming right angles around her beautiful face. Compared to my fear, she is a bastion of strength. I’m even less afraid when I’m around her. However, I sometimes wake up at night and am fearful for her. That’s when I turn the light on in the bathroom so that a) I can see her from my bedroom and b) to keep my imagined boogie monsters at bay.

Differences in the way objects appear during the day and night is interesting. I took a biochemistry class in 2004 and learned that the eye, not surprisingly, sees more precision during the day but is better at sensing motion at night. This phenomenon is highlighted by the fact that I need glasses. Without glasses at night, I can see less detail but am still sensitive to motion. During the day, I am rarely afraid. But at night, my other senses are heightened. When I grab for my glasses on the coffee table in the dark, for example, I don’t actually see the glasses clearly, although I pick them out at first reach about 90% of the time. It’s not so much that I can see their exact shape, but I can pick them out even amidst the rubble that is on my coffee table.  My imagination fills in what I can’t see.

So at night, familiar objects have a different look to them. The two mules looking out at me from the picture I took at the zoo take on a more somber meaning. The woman with heavy mascara looking out from a chemical dependency calendar I got for free looks downright scary at night. (I have to replace it.)

Falling Asleep Without Crying It Out- March 15, 2013

~ theantelopediaries

It’s 9:30 pm and my 7-month-old daughter is beside me, awake and curious.  A wind up ladybug is turning to the sound of “Someday Over the Rainbow” as she reaches for the keys on my laptop.  I tried holding her, rocking with her, breastfeeding, to no avail.  Last night she went to bed at 10 pm, and it looks like another night of the same.  Hold on, I have to take care of some crying. 

Yep, she fell asleep at 10 on the nose.  She was so cranky, that as soon as she latched on to my breast she fell asleep.  The times when she is asleep in front of me are some of my most treasured moments.  I hold her there, on the boppy, and if I could, I would hold her there all night.  If I didn’t need sleep and had infinite time and didn’t have to do anything else, I would hold her there all night.  It’s funny, but that’s the closeness I feel when she is asleep.

I just finished reading a book about ways to get your child to sleep.  I was surprised that one of the supposed professional recommendations was letting your child cry themselves out until they fall asleep.  This has the unappealing distinction of being called the “extinction” method.  The logic behind this plan is to force children to learn how to fall asleep by themselves.  If you help them by attending to them, the argument goes, your child will need you to help them fall asleep again if they wake up during the night or to fall asleep on subsequent nights.  With regard to the former, that has not been my experience.  My daughter wakes up about 6 hours after falling asleep to nurse and usually goes right back to sleep.  If she’s not asleep, I put her back in her crib and go back to sleep myself.  She does manage to fall asleep by herself, because when I get up in the morning, she is asleep. However, each night, we go through the same rituals of going to sleep- nursing, rocking, stand and hold, repeat.  When the crying continues, we let her stay up with us, as we did tonight, until she gets tired.  This is so much easier than letting her cry and cry and cry.  We live in an apartment, so that’s not really an option for us.  Secondly, and more importantly, I do not think this is good for her neurological development.  God knows why we have such loud babies compared to other animals.  While most animals try to protect their young from predators, a human baby’s cry would certainly attract them.  On the flip side, maybe it forces families to attend to their kin.  Maybe it’s a test of loyalty or perseverance.  Hey, it could be worse.  Salmon, for example, die after spawning.

Whatever the reason, nature has endowed humans, most of us anyway, with a sense of compassion for crying babies.  While I can understand how someone can become fed up with a crying baby (they are, after all, self-centered), it seems unethical and immoral to let a baby cry and cry and cry.  I don’t profess to be an expert on baby’s sleep.  I guess I am lucky that while my child becomes fussy and cries in our nightly ritual, my husband can attend to her while I regroup.  It would be a lot harder for a single mother, or a woman without that kind of support.

The best part about this experience is the last part.  When she does fall asleep, it’s the result of a hard won effort, the icing on the cake, so to speak, which makes the moment sweeter.  The weight of her body on my lap, her chubby cheeks turned to one side, her eyes peacefully closed.  All I want to do is be with her at that moment, to feel her breathing and the dynamic energy of her presence.  At some time in the future, this will end.  She won’t need me to hold her anymore.  She won’t latch on to my breast for comfort.  So I’m cherishing these moments that we have together.  Caring for an infant seems like a long time because it’s the only thing I know now, but in the timeline that is life, it is a short period.  It’s not always easy, but I find ways to treasure it now.