Since Leo's birth, I have mostly eschewed parenting books. This is because, on the precipice of 30, I know myself well enough to know that if I decide I subscribe to any one parenting theory, I'll create arbitrary rules for myself, and when I somehow break one of said rules, I will feel deficient as a mom. Dramatic, yes, but at least I know how to avoid this, right?
However. For the first few days of life, when every time Leo cried it was a giant guessing game, I was a little bewildered at how we could spend 10 months reading about every detail of pregnancy, but barely any time researching parenting or babies!
I think it was Day 7 or so when I sent Vinny to Babies R Us in search of the book
The Happiest Baby on the Block by Harvey Karp. We became Karpites immediately. Basically, Karp's premise is that in their first three or four months of life, before they have any self-soothing mechanisims, babies are in the "Fourth Trimester" - they are, in effect, fetuses outside of the womb.
He says if you master the "5 S's," which are meant to mimic the womb, and perform them in the correct order, you can soothe most any baby. Guess what? He's right.
His 5 S's are:
-Swaddling
-Shhh-ing
-Side/Stomach
-Sucking
-Swinging
After reading this, I immediately sent Vinny
back to Babies R Us to get one of the few items from our registry we hadn't received: the
Graco Sweetpeace Newborn Soothing Center, AKA The Swing to End All Swings. This puppy has 3 of the S's built right in - a swaddler, a button that plays several different types of white noise, and duh, swinging. It is definitely in my top 5 baby things to have!
So. This brings us to the past week. Leo has been sleeping very restlessly - grunting, stretching, fussing. And since he's in his little sidecar bassinet in our room, if he's sleeping restlessly, we aren't sleeping at all.
After analysis and reanalysis, we decided one of the reasons he was waking up so often was not, thankfully, hunger, but the fact that he was performing his Baby Houdini acts and getting out of his swaddling. In both is 2D and his 3D ultrasound, his hands were always by his face, and regular swaddlers pin his arms to his body. Basically, we think he was fighting the swaddlers all night to get his hands up near his face where he's more comfortable. I researched different swaddlers for Baby Houdinis, and finally found....ta da!....
the Woombie!
Yesterday I traveled to Old Town Littleton to pick one up, and we zipped him into it last night with bated breath.
He slept from 9 until 1:30! He woke up to nurse at 1:30, and went right back to sleep. He woke up at 4:45 to nurse, but when I put him back down, he was fidgety and grunty again. Vin figured out that in these wee hours of the morning, he wants even more freedom of movement, so we removed the Woombie and swaddled him in the fabulous, gigantic Swaddle Designs blanket his Grandma gave him, and he slept again soundly until 8:00!
Our teamwork and powers of deduction may have - at last - gotten us some nice, solid sleep!
His cosleeper is now jerry rigged with books underneath the head of the bed to create an incline for comfort from his reflux, a burp cloth under his head for spit-up mishaps, a sleep positioner to make him feel extra snuggly, a rolled up towel so he doesn't slide down to the bottom due to the reflux incline, and - duh- a blanket. And I think we may have finally created a perfect sleeping haven for him!
We've been trying to push his bedtime back from 7 or so until 9 or 10 - maybe I'll even shoot for 11 - so that he does that nice long 4 or 5 hour stretch while we, too, are sleeping. He is great at falling asleep on his own. He knows that once he's swaddled and the room smells like lavender oil, and the little sound machine/light projector his Nonna gave him is turned on, it's lights out!
Here's what he looked like last night 5 minutes into putting him down:
And here's what I woke up to, in his Swaddle Designs blankie:
Pretty comfy, huh? Here's hoping for more uninterrupted sleep for all of us. Stay tuned!
