update: sleep

[metaphortunate]

Update: OH MY GOD.

So the idea here is that you don't feed the kid when it cries in the night. BUT, you're not gonna leave your kid to cry from hunger either. So the scheme is, you figure out when it usually wakes in the night, and then you set an alarm & go and feed them an hour BEFORE that time. Then hunger doesn't wake them. If you mistimed it & the kid isn't hungry, you try again in an hour, cause it's important to get to the kid before it wakes up on its own.

This worked great with the Junebug.

Tonight I have discovered 3 things:

1) if the kid refuses to eat all night, you wake yourself up every hour all night, wake the kid up, then feel like an exhausted asshole as it cries itself back to sleep.

2) Rocket does not need to eat in the night NEARLY as much as he has been claiming.

3) Holy shit. I guess he really HADN'T been sleeping as well as he could have. He's just peacefully down. Jesus, maybe he might have slept through the night weeks ago if we'd moved him to the crib.

Comments

[wild_irises]

Please, when you beat yourself up about this (as both of these posts say you are), remember that you are sleep-deprived and therefore your judgment is, by definition, not good.

I cannot tell you how many times I said this to dancingsinging, and now I am saying it to you.

[metaphortunate]

I no longer even have the energy to beat myself up. I'll do that after coffee. ;)

And yes, I'll keep that in mind. Shouldn't be too hard, it's self-evident.

[thistleingrey]

I agree with wild_irises.

#2 makes good sense, given Rocket's age. Stomachs grow, and although his energy levels will keep rising as he crawls and walks and omg runs, past six months his stomach ought to be large enough to accommodate the food he'll need to fuel it without night feeding.

[metaphortunate]

Well...and partly, it's because he's sick, poor little guy. Greeted me in the morning with vigorous barfing.

Shit.

[thistleingrey]

Aw, poor Rocket--hope he feels better soon.

[rosefox]

So the idea here is that you don't feed the kid when it cries in the night. BUT, you're not gonna leave your kid to cry from hunger either. So the scheme is, you figure out when it usually wakes in the night, and then you set an alarm & go and feed them an hour BEFORE that time. Then hunger doesn't wake them. If you mistimed it & the kid isn't hungry, you try again in an hour, cause it's important to get to the kid before it wakes up on its own.

What's the rationale for this?

[metaphortunate]

Basically we're trying to teach him that once he's been put down in his crib & wished goodnight, the only thing to do is to go to sleep, because crying will at most bring a parent in to reassure him that we haven't disappeared: crying will not result in being picked up & rocked to sleep, & it will DEFINITELY not result in milk. So that when he wakes in the middle of the night, as babies inevitably do, he learns to just go back to sleep. But this only works if he's not legitimately hungry. So I need to taper off the night feeds, so he shifts to eating more during the day.

[rosefox]

Ahh, gotcha. Thanks for the explanation.

[jrtom]

As far as I can tell, there is nothing that I could do about sleep training that did not make me feel like a terrible parent. Nevertheless, they all seem to have survived so far. :)

And yes, it can be a rude shock when something that worked for kid A totally does not work for kid B. (Said shock may have been diminished in our case by the fact that kid B was in fact kids B_1 and B_2, which diminished any expectation that we had the slightest idea about anything anymore. So glad the twins weren't first...)