Sleepytime!

 

We have been doing some 'sleep training' with Benjamin.  He is such an angel of a baby, except when it comes to sleeping.  This is a picture  of 3 week old sleeping Benji.  A few things that are working.  A bedtime routine.  He loves his bath, and we give him a massage while playing some Mozart in the background.  We feed him, read him stories, give him a snuggle and then turn out the lights and put him into bed.  If I can time it right, he's sleepy, but not sleeping, just like the books say that he should be.  Then I pat him on the back for a few minutes and if all goes well, like it has the last couple of nights, he is off to dreamland, not to awake before 6am.  Thing is, the little guy has a tendancy to wake 40 minutes after putting him to sleep.  So on the suggestion of a friend and taking the advice of a book, I started going in 5 minutes before he usually wakes and give him pats to help him in the transition back to sleep.  If he wakes up fully he is a bear to put back down.  Still working on getting white noise.  Can't justify a white noise machine when Joel downloaded some that we just need to put on a cd  - a cd that we don't have in our collection yet, but maybe tomorrow I'll make it to the store.  I tried static on the radio for one night.  Only one night, until the random blasting noises came and totally made all of the sleep training efforts for the evening in vain.  I don't think it would be so bad if we didn't live one block from the Fire station.  I used to think that Waterloo was crime central with the sirens going off past our house every day...till I realized our location.  Can you tell that sleep is on the brain?  He's been doing much better at nights.  The catalyst for sleep training was having a night where he woke up, not even exaggerating, every 20 - 30 minutes.  I was a disaster.  And the old way of rocking him to sleep just wasn't cutting it anymore.  Until I started asking, I never knew that you could leave a baby to cry for a few minutes in the middle of the night and they would most likely go back to sleep.  The little things we learn that make life that much easier.  And sometimes he just needs to cry a little before he goes to sleep.  The little now is down from a lot when we first started, but it has progressed.  And hopefully will continue.  Next we'll tackle his short naps...This is my life though.  This little guy is my life and I just want to do what's best for him.  And sleep is good for both of us.