Six Months and Change

The twins had their six month appointment yesterday. Gregory has been slowly catching up to Dominic in size. First he was two pounds lighter; then one; and now he weighs six ounces more! What a chunk. (He is 14 lb 11 oz; Dominic is 14 lb 5 oz.) In fact, Gregory is in the 4th percentile. I believe that's the highest any of my children have ever gotten!

I've been thinking (stressing) about sleep a lot these days, specifically daytime sleep. Then at some point I realized that while yes, naps are pretty bad still ... nighttime has gotten a lot better from a month ago. So I thought that it would be a good idea to do a sort of "update" here once a month so that, on days I want to run away screaming down the road, I can look back and see that things are slowly but surely getting better.

So ... sleep. Sorry if I've already blogged about anything below ... feel free to skip. I won't be offended. ;)

Dominic: Goes to bed at 7:30. For a while he was sleeping until 4-5 am in his crib. Now he seems to be developing an 11 pm wake up; after that he will go from 2-6 am. He wakes up at the crack of dawn and Keith gets up with him. I did some "nap training" with him three weeks ago and it worked great. But then, just as I breathed a sigh of relief, he decided 20 minute naps were all he needed. Sigh. So, he will go down for 30-45 minutes twice in the morning/afternoon; I let him cry or fuss for ten minutes after he wakes up and sometimes he will fall back asleep again, usually in the late afternoon. It's all very hit or miss right now.

I predict that he'll be one of those teens who stays up all night then falls asleep wherever.

Gregory: he now goes to sleep in our bed BY HIMSELF hallelujah! Either I nurse him to sleep or Keith puts him down; he gets his stuffed dog to keep him company. Occasionally he wakes up once or twice and Keith coaxes him back down. I think we're going to try him in the crib at night soon. Naptime ... sometimes he sleeps in the swing or his bouncy chair for as long as half an hour ...? But that's it. And he is the sleepiest, whiniest, saddest baby because of it. We have a prescription for baby Zantac now; once he's on it I am going to start instituting naptime.


I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to stick both the boys in their cribs for naps or try to train them separately so that Gregory doesn't bother Dominic, who is more likely to sleep. Any thoughts from mothers of multiples on this would be great. :)

taking refuge in the internet

I actually have "blogging" on my to-do list today, and I was going to write a post about my weekend and how wonderful it was. Because it was pretty great.

But then Michael didn't take his morning nap. He didn't take it at 10am, but he woke up late this morning, so I wasn't too worried. He didn't take it at 11am, either. Or noon. Which was when I knew today was officially going to be a mess. That morning nap only ever lasts half an hour, but it seems to be what the entire day is built upon.

And of course I finished my secret stash of chocolate off yesterday, so I had to resort to chips and salsa, which is yummy and crunchy and salty but not exactly consoling.

Sometime around 1pm he was wailing in his swing and I was curled up and wailing in bed with a pillow over my ears.

Sometime after that I managed to convince him I wasn't an awful person for putting him in his crib and he slept for twenty whole minutes.

There was a lot of desperate prayer going up during all that, but I can't say I was very open to grace, because my prayers in that sort of situation tend to follow this pattern:

"Lord, please help my baby sleep. Please give me patience and strength to deal with this situation." "Lord, this baby is still not asleep. Please, please, please, thanks ....? Please?"  "Lord, why aren't you giving me patience????? And why won't my baby sleep?!?!?! I know you can hear me. What the heck is taking so long?! Argh!"

I am laughing as I type this, but I'm afraid to say I am not exaggerating the ridiculousness of the situation.

Now he's sleeping again on my bed and I am not trying to move him to his crib or touching him in any way, not until he wakes up.

This is bad for my sanity, yes. But what really upsets me is his exhausted face.

I will blog about the weekend later.

And now I am going to drink tea.

Thank you.

Drilling, drilling, drilling ....

There are upsides to having your landlady live downstairs. When I couldn't find my keys anywhere (they were in a random drawer), she loaned me the key to the front door so I could walk to Giant Eagle with Michael. She's always been very attentive to things that need fixing or improving in the apartment, and now that she's just one floor down she is even more prompt about taking care of things.

I know this is a good thing, and so I'm trying not to be grumpy about the really loud hammering and sawing that's going on just outside, especially since Michael seems to be sleeping through it. But it seems like ever since our landlords have moved in, they've had some sort of worker over here every week or two. Jackhammers redo the concrete steps (twice, since the first time they were all crooked); plumbers turning off the water; electricians making more noise than one would expect electricians to need to make (although they fixed our bathroom switch, yay!); workers installing central AC in the downstairs apartment.

I wouldn't even mind, in general, except for Michael. When they were installing the AC and doing other work prior to the landlords moving in, he was pretty scared of all the noise. And it's not as if he's a great napper anyway.



Speaking of naps. Nighttime sleep is a lot better around here. Not perfect, but I'm okay with that. Michael now goes down around 8pm, sleeps until 1 or 2 before waking up to eat, then sleeps until 4ish, at which point I take him into bed with us, otherwise he'd be waking up every hour until it was time to get up. Often he'll wake up anywhere between 5-30 minutes after going down for the night and protest being in his crib, but he either goes to sleep right away if I go in and pat his back or, if that doesn't work, will cry/fuss for 10-15 minutes until going to sleep.

Ferber worked for us. The hardest night was #2, when he woke up every hour literally all. night. long. Uggggggh. But after that he settled into the pattern we have now, more or less. We had a setback when he caught a cold and had to start over, and he cried for 45 minutes the first night after that. But I no longer have to lay down with him for half an hour (or longer) and then sneeeeeak away only to have him wake up again ten minutes later.

Praise God.

Naps, on the other hand. Oh, naps. They are still like that. He will not stay asleep for more than half an hour. Will not. Naps reenergize him for about twenty minutes and then he gets super grumpy because he hasn't slept enough. By the end of the day neither of us is pleasant to be around.

This week I resolved to have him nap in his crib (rather than in our bed), even if it was only for 10 minutes at a time, just so he'd learn that crib=sleep=crib, even in the daytime. This resolution sort of fell apart yesterday, when he took one nap in his swing, one in the cars eat, and one in our bed. And we will be visiting parents for the next couple nights, so obviously naps and sleep in general are going to be different.

Maybe next week.

Sleep. Or no sleep.

(This post will probably bore people who aren't parents. Tough bananas. You don't have to read it.) 

(I have no idea where "tough bananas" came from. I need more coffee.)

Today, Michael is five months old.

Yesterday, we started sleep-training. 

Wrapped in his Grandma-made blankie while his Mama blogs.

Daytime sleep has been pretty scarce round here these days, and nighttime sleep isn't much better. (This is why I haven't posted much lately ... no naps, no blogging. Or knitting. And often no laundry or vaccuuming.) Over the past few weeks we've slipped into cosleeping, which wasn't the plan. In some ways it works out fine--it is really easy to meet Michael's needs at night--but ultimately, it still isn't what I want to do, because I don't want 1) Michael to depend on me being next to him to go to sleep (meaning a late bedtime for him or early bedtime for me, and no baby-free time for me and Keith), or 2) our bedroom to be offlimits to us after Michael's bedtime. Maybe there is some way around these difficulties, but the real big problem around here these days is #1. 

When he was three months old, Michael slept through the night in his crib in the other room. I would put him down between nine and ten pm, and he would wake up between four and five am, and I would simply take him into bed with me, nurse him, and fall back asleep until he woke up for the morning. That was awesome. 

Then around four months, it started getting more and more difficult to put him down for the night. He'd sleep for anywhere between 10 and 30 minutes, then wake up and need to be coddled and soothed until he fell back asleep ... for another 10 to 30 minutes. And he started waking up at 2am instead of 4 or 5am. Because it was hard to get him back to sleep, and because I was so tired that I usually fell asleep nursing him anyway, I would take him into bed at 2am, which meant he was spending most of the night with us. 

Now the only way to get him to sleep, day or night, is to lay down and hold him on the bed, my arm wrapped around him and supporting his head. Rocking him, standing by the crib with him, etc are no longer enough. He knows what he wants and will settle for nothing less.  Sometimes he'll nap in the swing for ten or fifteen minutes; getting him to sleep longer than that during the day is almost impossible. This week he's had days where he's only napped for about an hour altogether, and by the end of the day both Michael and Mama are having meltdowns. (Poor Papa.) 

So something has to change. I'm a little anxious because we're traveling to Colorado next weekend for a wedding, and I worry that any training we do now will be undone ... but we really can't wait to do this any longer. 

After reading about different methods and thinking about how they might interact with Michael's personality, we've decided to go with a modified version of the Ferber method: letting him cry for a certain amount of time and then going in and soothing him. (Modified because I am not comfortable with an indefinitely increasing amount of time leaving him by himself.) It took about 45 minutes for him to fall asleep last night. I think if Keith hadn't been here, I would probably have given up on it about half an hour in, which in my opinion would have been really bad, because then his crying would have been for nothing. But now that I know he can do it, maybe it will be a little easier tonight.

I know some people believe that cry-it-out methods are cruel. I don't--or at least, not the Ferber method specifically, where the parents are continually going in to soothe the baby. I know he doesn't understand, but I also know I'm not doing irrevocable damage to our bond of trust, because this little guy receives a lot of love and has all his needs met. 

But it's still hard. For me, and for him. I know there will be many, many times in his life where I have to do something hard as a parent to achieve something good for him. Disciplining him, telling him he can't have something he wants, etc--I guess this is a window into those difficulties. 

We'll see how tonight goes.

(ETA: The nap pictured above has lasted more than two hours! It shows signs of ending very soon, but praise God. :) )