Thursday, September 03, 2009

The long hours between 7pm and 7am

We've embarked on a new journey with Lake - and it's going to be hell! Lake is by far a bad sleeper - has been from night one. He sleeps very lightly and restlessly and will easily wake every 60 to 90 minutes in an average night. So after nearly 9 months of this, Deah is beyond a walking zombie. So we started a new sleep technique with him last night with mild success. I hate the words sleep training so we're sleep "coaching" him to ultimately get him to self-sooth at night when he does wake and isn't hungry (and at 23 lbs - the lad doesn't need to eat in the middle of the night!). Basically what we are doing is removing Deah from dealing with Lake at night at all and inserting me instead so that he can't snack off breast milk to get himself back to sleep. I bounce him to calm the worst of his crying (which is fairly easy because he loves this), and then slowly slow down the rhythm of the bounce as he starts to get more and more sleepy so that (in time) he is simply falling asleep without needing the bounce. All in all we are expecting this to take close to 2 weeks to have it down - maybe longer as it is Lake we're talking about and that kid has a set of lungs and a stubborn streak to go with them!

Last night was night one and it sucked with some small victories along the way. I can see the victories now that it's daylight but at 2 am I certainly wasn't seeing them! Lake first stirred around 9:30 and wasn't fully back asleep in the bed until 1:30. I could get him into a dazed and confused kind of zoning stare and *this close* to being asleep, but then he'd start wailing again and we'd have to start all over. One of the victories I noticed was he easily took a bottle of water from me. So clue number one: the lad is looking for the comfort suck to get him back to sleep. Ok a bottle of water right now I can handle since it means that Deah's not having him snack feed all night. It does make me wonder about trying him on a soother again since he rejected it at 5 months. The other small victory I had was being able to transfer him easily from my arms to my chest, wait 10 minutes and then move him onto the bed. It was hard when the worst of the exhaustion was hitting but so worth it when I got a solid hour of sleep!

So today we're both a little bit cranky and I'm sure he has a sleep deprived headache as much as I do. The only difference is I can mask my with a strong coffee!

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