For about three weeks now, we’ve been trying to put the girls on a regular eating and sleeping schedule. We’ve been using a variety of child-rearing books as guides: Ferber’s Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, and Sears’ The Baby Book. As some of you may know, the advice in these books is contradictory, so we pretty much just adopted what we liked from the three. The following “rules” are what we’ve been using:
1. Regular eating times. We’ve trained the girls to eat every four hours. This means that if they wake up wanting to eat and it’s only been three hours, we soothe them until the clock reaches four hours.
2. Separation between day and night sleep. We chose an arbitrary twelve hour period that would be their “nighttime”, for example 7pm to 7am. During this time, we don’t do much talking or playing. They eat, burp, and get put back into the crib. Since they sleep longer at night, they usually only need one feeding in the middle of the twelve hour period, meaning they can go six hours between meals instead of four.
3. Morning and afternoon naps. We make sure that they get a good two hour nap before noon and one after noon. This means we don’t take them outside if it means interfering with their naps. Our friend Sophia allows her son to sleep in the stroller reclined if she happens to be out of the house and he needs to take his nap. Dr. Weissbluth doesn’t like kids to sleep anywhere but their cribs, i.e. no carseat, bouncy, stroller, or swing sleeping, so we try to keep our outings less than an hour so that the kids can get their nap.
4. Sleep training. We try to minimize the things they need to fall asleep, e.g. we put them in their cribs while they’re still awake so that they can learn to fall asleep alone. We’re still swaddling and giving a pacifier, although we’re considering stopping these things as well. Also, if they are supposed to be sleeping, i.e. nighttime sleep or nap, we don’t let them come out of the crib. We let them cry a bit, to see if they can soothe themselves back to sleep. At the most, we put a pacifier back into their mouths, or pat them a little. According to Dr. Weissbluth, this may teach them to cry harder and longer to get a response from the parent, but since our kids are only two-and-a-half months old, I don’t think they’re doing anything so volitional yet.
5. Avoiding “fussy tired”. This is my phrase for the cranky state the kids reach when they’ve been awake for too long. When they get to “fussy tired”, they have a hard time sleeping even though they’re actually exhausted. We avoid this state by putting them to bed as soon as we see the earliest signs of tiredness, i.e. one yawn, rubbing the eyes, drooping eyelids, staring off into space. According to Dr. Weissbluth, infants reach this state in less than two hours of wakefulness, so we always put them to bed before they’ve been awake this long.
So far, making these changes have made things a lot better. The kids are more alert when they’re awake, and they’ve been eating and sleeping better. Of course, we don’t always follow these rules, especially if we have visitors, but it’s nice to have guidelines to fall back on when things get hectic.
Those are great guidelines… works wonders. Although I do let him fall asleep in the stroller, I try to keep it to a minimal b/c he doesn’t sleep long/well there. However, when he was much younger (until he outgrew his carseat @9mo), I took him out all the time to run errands and such and he would sleep in the infant carseat. It didn’t disturb him at all and he slept fine at night in the crib. When he graduated to the convertible seats, it’s more difficult to transfer. But by then, his naps consolidated into 2-3 naps a day and he was awake most of the time so I can take him to run errands for a couple hours. Mind you, outings are not everyday but usually on the weekends.
it’s good to hear that lucas slept fine in the infant carseat and therefore you could take him out and he could nap there. if you strictly follow dr. weissbluth’s advice, you’re pretty much a prisoner in your own house since they’re not supposed to sleep anywhere but their own cribs. we also like taking the girls out in their carseats and the snap n’ go. they seem to sleep okay there too.
isn’t snap and go great? i miss it. the next stroller is so much heavier and cumbersome. i think the books mean well, but you have to adapt it to your own kids and what your habits are in order to keep your sanity. i used to keep him in the carseat to sleep next to the shower so i can take a quick shower. eleanor looks so cute and peaceful.
just a quick comment — the picture is actually miranda. i try to make sure we identify who is in each picture in the blog entry itself, but if we don’t mention it in the text, you can reliably hover over any of these pictures and it will say who it is in the tooltip that shows up. i put the name in the “alt” and “title” text of the picture that is there for the visually impaired (and required for html standard compliance). if they’re both in the picture, i label them from left to right.