Eli is learning to sleep! (Thank goodness.) He's seven months old now and is finally getting to more nights where he wakes only once during my normal sleeping hours (10-ish PM to 6-ish AM). This is a huge accomplishment for him and a huge relief for me.
Learning how to help Eli learn to sleep has been a brand new process for us. Of course, he's a different person from Maia, and so he doesn't sleep like she did. That's self-evident. He's such a cuddly baby with such a big personality--nighttime wakings have sometimes been a process of convincing a charming, chatting, big-eyed Eli that it's not time to hang out and talk and play. I'd say that that's the primary thing that we've had to teach him.
The primary thing that he's had to teach us is that he knows when he's hungry. I know this might seem simplistic, but all of the various "cry it out" methods of sleep training--especially the ones that demand that they be implemented with very young infants, younger than three months--seem to me to hinge on the idea that babies don't have anything to teach their parents about individual nighttime needs and habits. We've had to learn from Eli that his nighttime food needs aren't textbook. He's still off-the-charts in terms of size--he's weighing-in at around 26 pounds at seven months, which is still that nonsensical "100th percentile," I think. He wasn't born at that percentile, so I didn't have signs from the very start that hugeness was probably in his future. I believe firmly that without nighttime feedings, he would have failed to thrive (and I do mean that medically, the official diagnosis). His caloric needs are remarkable, far beyond what we experienced with Maia. It feels like this is his body's path, his individual growth trajectory that's a part of his DNA. I really believe that if we'd tried to "cry it out" early on with Eli, we would have ended up in the hospital with a dehydrated, undernourished baby.
I know that parenting so often is about choosing strategies that feel right to you, and then finding "evidence" to support your decision. I know that's what I'm doing here, and I put "evidence" in quotes for a reason. There's no science behind it either way as far as I know--cry it out or not--no peer-reviewed, double-blind studies. This is purely anecdotal, and, to quote my favorite old adage about research: "The plural of anecdote is NOT data."
2 comments:
So how did you go about teaching him about night being a sleepy time? And did he cry?
I think he learned about nighttime sleep via our co-sleeping arrangement those first few months. His "barnacle baby" status early on brought him in tune with my body's rhythms right from the start, because he was attached to me in one way or another almost all day. I think that's how he learned to nap, too. The way he felt so in tune with me--it was new for me, and pretty intense. It was definitely exhausting.
After that first week, when he got his days and nights switched where they belong, his personality has led him to be quite easy to get back to sleep. (Maia wasn't.) He woke up frequently, but they were largely pretty efficient.
So, for sure Eli "yells" and expresses impatience and frustration. (He was doing it this morning. I wish I could record it and post what it sounds like.) But it's almost like that's a pressure valve when he's tired--he lets that tension out for a minute or two (with no tears involved), and then he falls asleep.
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