Intrepid Murmurings

Two posts in one day! My gawd, what is up?

I wanted to get up to speed on recording the data from days one and two of our new experiment, Nap Regime 2007 (also known as Fun with Sleeping and Cribs).

The program started yesterday. It was started for two reasons:

1) The baby is not napping during the day, unless she is in arms. No other way will do. The bed or the Amby? Pishaw, that is for little babies, or grownups, but not 7.5 month olds. At the end of the day, she is a whiny, hysterical mess, as am I.

2) Our bed, which was working pretty well for awhile (not lately), is not safe for a crawler. It is tall, high, massive, and very far from the ground. I do not trust the lowly guard rail or the wall of pillows I carefully construct around her for more than a minute. I am hyper-vigilantly listening on the monitor when she is up there and run up at every peep, which is usually before she starts moving around too much, but it is a very faulty system which needs work (we are going to be taking the bed frame down in the next few days, but that still won't completely solve the issue, just make it a wee bit less scary)

So. We do have a crib, and it can be used for more than containment while I shower. The trick now is to get her to associate it with sleeping, not playing, which is what she has been doing in it so far. In the early days we tried to get her to sleep in it, to no avail. The time has come to try again.

The plan is to attempt some sleeping in the crib each day. I will only work on one nap a day (ideally she gets two, har har), and only two attempts at a given time; any more than that is too much for either of us, and spans the whole day anyway. I have not decided whether to let her sleep in arms at other times of the day or not. Part of me wants to cut her off from that completely, though at that point she really needs the sleep, any sleep (three days ago she took a two and a half hour nap in my arms in the PM). I might fall back on trying to get her down in the more familiar ways, nursing down in our bed, or letting her sleep on me in a carrier, ideally on my back. I know a lot of folks would have moved on to crying it out by now, but we just can't do that.

Day 1: Yesterday, I started with the morning nap. I took her in to her room when she was sleepy, put on her sleepy music, read her a story and rocked her in the glider while nursing her down. She fell asleep, and I attempted a transfer. She awoke upon impact of the mattress, I tried to resettle her by singing and rubbing her back but she awoke, so I nursed her down again and attempted transfer number two. She woke again, and in frustration I leaned over the crib rail to see if I could nurse her down like that. Hilarity insued. She was awake. After two attempts (my limit) I put her in the Kozy carrier on my back so I get some work done. She didn't sleep until later that day, in the swing, for less than an hour.

Day 2: Today, I tried the crib napping in the afternoon, since I had read that afternoon sleep is more solid. I attempted to nurse her down in our bed for the AM nap but she would not sleep. Later, she slept for about 25 minutes in the carrier while on a walk with Lonnie. Around 2PM she was definitely tired, so I did the nap routine in her room. We started a bottle, but I had an idea and took it away half way through and nursed her down, instead. She fell asleep, and then, when she awoke as I put her in the crib, I slipped the bottle in and got her back to sleep with that. Progress! We had sleeping in the crib for about 6 minutes before she awoke with a cry, and was wide awake after that. One 10 minute nap later in the day on me, one 15 min one in the bed. Total sleep less than an hour.

I am going to try to log in every days info for awhile, though I promise it will be way less chitter chatter and more reporting of the basic facts. I am hoping we will see some progress in a week or two...but am not counting on it. I don't expect our crappy sleeper to become a perfect napper; but something a little better than what we have now would sure be swell.