Crap, missed the edit window. Boy 1.0 is watching Sprout, Boy 2.0 is asleep. I also wanted to clarify it’s not just the authors of Baby Wise that turned me off; it was the program’s scheduling approach that just went against my instincts.
Still, I’m wondering how much it matters when the kids are, say, 5 years old what sleep training they went through (if any). More research to do, I suppose.
Now, that whole showering thing…gonna do it, really…
My son never liked to sleep on his back. He started nursing mostly from one side and refusing the other. He would fuss and cry and sometimes scream when he was laid on his back. We took him to the doc who told me that it was nothing, scolded me for coddling etc. Turns out it was a tumor; We were lucky that it was benign. If the doctor had followed through, and paid attention when I asked about his cafe au lait spots, we would have found out 4 months sooner. Sometimes there is a reason for the fussing.
Sleeping on the side is not the worst. Do read up on SIDS, there have been many discoveries about its nature in the last two years, some of which might put your mind at ease. Crying when you are there holding him, or in the same room where he can hear you and knows you are near is much different than letting him cry out alone.
Labrador Deceiver the complaints I read were that babywise has been associated with failure to thrive and dehydration.
And cribs and playards account for about 43 deaths per year. Cite. So since you’re risking child death!!! either way you go, you might as well choose the way that is the most comfortable and leads to everyone sleeping better. Whatever that happens to be for you.
Edit: Regarding the “kid squirming out of the swaddling” thing; try the Miracle Blanket that Drain Bead mentioned. My sister had one for my niece and swore by it. My niece had to be tightly swaddled in order to sleep well, and she could get out of regular swaddling in like a minute flat. But the Miracle Blanket kept her snuggly and happy.
There are hot button topics and then there are HOT BUTTON TOPICS, like How-To-Get-Your-Child-To-Sleep which is right up there with Toilet Paper Over/Under Argument.
Everyone has an opinion and everyone out there feels theirs is THE RIGHT ONE, DAMMIT.
That said.
Here is a molotov cocktail for the hot button topic fire:
Get a hot water bottle and fill it with…warm to hot (not scalding)WATER. Dry it off and put it in with your baby. PUt the bottle on their stomach. They are not going to die or smother with it because it won’t adhere to their mouth and nose and it is too heavy for them too lift. When they can lift it, I promise you, they will toss it out of bed for fun! When they get teeth, they won’t eat it because it tastes like RUBBER and it’s craptacular. If they do bite through it, they will get wet, and by the time they do bite through it, the water will probably be tepid and they will get a splooshing.
My kids, (who are now 11 and 10, who also co-slept and tummy slept AND and a big ass down comforter on them courtesy of their German Grandmother. I’m such a horrible mother. ) still LOVE THEIR HOT WATER BOTTLES. And they didn’t die.
A Miracle Blanket, AFAICT is just a yuppified version of a baby burrito.
Wrap the child up like he was a huge spliff. They love this. ( I wrap my kids up just about every night in the winter like the worlds biggest doobs.) Double wrapping them, one regular baby blanket for the first layer and then a lap size blanket for the second to keep the most persistant wigglers in their place should do the trick.
Hell, I even love it. Who wouldn’t want to be wrapped up securely like that? One day, I’m getting me a weighed blanket, but for now, the 6# cat will do.
Another suggestion is get a noise machine that mimicks the womb or put a fan in the room.
Make whatever it is you use for comforting PORTABLE. (It needs to go to Grandma’s or the sitters or to the HOliday Inn.) I have a Sound Sleeperfor myself.
Just wanted to say that you have my sympathies on the respiratory issues! One of the primary reasons we wound up co-sleeping with our son was that his lungs would fill up with fluid every freaking time he’d get a cold and we needed him nearby to administer albuterol. He also had to take a lung steroid once for a particularly bad infection, which was just awful. They called me at daycare to tell me he had a fever and by the time I got there, I couldn’t wake him up! So the pediatrician prescribed a steroid with the same warnings. If it helps any, it wasn’t the steroid that made him jittery; it was actually the albuterol, but your mileage will inevitably vary. Are they also giving him antibiotics? My son’s pediatrician said that the steroid often results in a secondary infection because it opens up the tubes in the lungs so much that bacteria get in more easily or something along those lines. Just curious.
Anyway, I’m glad you’ve had some success with the napping. Our daughter is also not a napper, though I’m very lucky - she usually sleeps 8-10 hours at night. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing, though, since I can’t tell if it’s a result of her makeup or exhaustion. We and the daycare encourage longer naps, but it never seems to work. So, after she sleeps all night, I generally go in and wake her at 6:15 to feed and just bring her to bed with us for the rest of the morning.
Personally, I think that for parents sleep is a lose-lose proposition for at least the first few months, sometimes until they’re two or so. First, if they don’t sleep, you’re exhausted from being woken up all night. If they do sleep, you’re exhausted because you wake up all night wondering why they’re asleep. My first still sometimes wakes up at night at 3.5, which can really wipe us out. But with #2, I make myself crazy checking up on her, thinking, “Is she ok? Still breathing? Isn’t she hungry?” I even called the pediatrician once to ask if she thought there might be a problem because she was sleeping so much. I hope I’ll start getting some sleep myself maybe in a year or so.
Second, as you noted, how you get your kids to sleep becomes a subject of controversy.
Part of the problem is that so many accept that parents aren’t going to get any sleep, sometimes until the kid’s two! It’s so unnecessary. Babies can be sleep trained. It seems to me it’s just the natural thing to do. I have three kids, so it’s not like I could let every new baby disrupt the entire family and our schedules for up to two years. Am I the only one that just thinks that idea is utterly ridiculous?
With my first baby, his pediatrician told me to -right home from the hospital- put him to bed while awake, so that he could learn to get himself to sleep. She stressed to me so hard that it was important to do this. I was 21, and I thought, “Oh hell no- I’m rocking my precious to sleep, it’s for the best.” I went back to her when he was 5 months, out of my mind with sleeplessness and his crying at night. She then told me that I’d had to Ferberize my way out of it, showed me how to do it, I did it, and we all got sleep after that. With my second one, I was half-assed about it, and again, had to go through Ferberizing, which we can all agree is heart-breaking. My third came along, and right away I started with putting him to bed while he was still awake, and letting him teach himself how to get to sleep, including when he woke in the night, as we all do, after he no longer needed to eat in the night, at four months. He ended up sleeping more than either of the first two- every night right to bed with no arguments, good long naps throughout the appropriate ages, never any problems with sleep whatsoever, for the past 11 years.
I would never go back to rocking a baby to sleep, laying down with it, etc. It’s just so much better when your baby can get to sleep without all that.
For what it’s worth, I was being facetious. (Well, kinda - I really do still check on our three-month old because she sleeps so well, but that’s my problem, not hers.) But, I do think how you handle sleeping should take into consideration the kid’s temperament.
For some kids, you can try dedicated, patient Ferberizing for weeks (like we did with our son) and still have no results. For others, they take right to it. Our pediatrician was actually the person who told us to just take him to bed with us. Her comment was, “Great, you’ve tried it. It didn’t work. Apparently your son didn’t read the same books you did, so try something else.”
Oh sorry, I wasn’t specifically talking about you- the comment just reminded me that some parents are really extreme about getting their kid to sleep. I’ve known parents that will spend literally two or three hours every night trying to get their kid to sleep- not just babies but toddlers, up to four or five years old! Taking that much time out of your life to tend to one family member is not fair to you, your marriage, or your other family members (generic you). I’ve become very passionate about this subject over the years, not only from my own experience but hearing about others’.
As for Ferberizing, what a lot of people don’t seem to know is that if you start a healthy sleep program right out of the hospital, from birth, then you never have to Ferberize. The Ferber method is used to break bad sleep habits- but they never have to start to begin with.
There are no hard and fast rules with babies. They each have his/her own unique personality. So, keep doing what you’re doing and asking for methods that have worked with other people. Eventually you’ll come across one that will prove helpful.
My husband’s aunts swear that the key to getting a baby to sleep through the night is by feeding them a few teaspoons of baby cereal mixed with formula/milk before they go to bed.
I, personally, found that “white noise” is invaluable for helping both infants and adults sleep better. I think they have tapes that you can buy, but I always just used an old fan (that wasn’t pointed at the baby). Too quiet and they end up startling at the slightest noise.
I also discovered with both babies that once they hit a certain weight (12 pounds?), they slept a lot better. I think itty bitty babies’ bellies are so small that they need to eat more often.
No worries. And I agree with you that spending so long putting one family member to sleep is excessive, particularly for a healthy toddler (it doesn’t help that they have so much more stamina).
Another thing that’s important to note (and it’s probably been touched on) is that five to six hours is considered sleeping through the night by most pediatricians. My understanding is that even breastfed babies should only be waking up 1 time, 2 times max, at the three-month mark. Of course, that all goes out the window when they’re growing or sick.
AUGH. Got Boy 2.0 down for his nap; things looked GREAT, like he was in position to nap 2+ hours again like yesterday. Then Boy 1.0, in his medically hyperactive state, stubbed his toe and his “OW!” was in dramatic, high volume, high drama fashion…and woke up Boy 2.0. It took 30min to get the baby back down, and even then, I had him sleeping on my chest–I didn’t dare move him. Finally got the sick preschooler down for his nap 3 hours late when the baby wakes up and cries; hubby (who took the day off to help) just strapped Boy 1.0 into the Baby Bjorn and went for a walk. Oof.
Thank GOD there’s only two of them. Three or more, and we’d be outnumbered.
Any kind of crying it out is postponed at least a few days.
overlyverbose, ah, so glad to hear from a been-there-done-that parent. 
Although, it seems unusual to me that our son is getting this for the first time at nearly 4 years old; seems the sort of thing that shows up younger. But, eh, whaddoIknow. He has not been irritable, thankfully, but he HAS been very wired. The albuterol has made him BOINGBOINGBOING. Very cutely BOINGBOINGBOING, though, at least; he’s polite and playful and bright eyed. I know when I had to use a nebulizer for the flu in October, I felt like a million bucks after (oxygen! it’s feels SO GOOD!). I wonder if that might be part of his good mood; feeling better is such an exciting relief.
For as many of the anti-Baby Wise crowd, there are just as many that find it a very useful method of getting your child to sleep regularly at night. So :p.
One thing that I do know, is that all kids are different, and one thing that may work for one child may not work for another, even from the same parents.
DO NOT USE BABYWISE. Babies have DIED because of their recommendations!
Whenever we get one donated to the library (usually unread, BTW), we put it in the recycle bin because we don’t want other people getting their hands on it.
ETA: Didn’t realize this was a revived zombie thread. I would imagine that the OP’s kids sleep nicely through the night now that they are in school. :o
I think it depends on the individual kid. Our first quickly started sleeping through the night. The second, no matter what we did, just wouldn’t sleep more than a couple of hours at a time. Let him cry it out? We tried. We eventually found out he had sensory integration issues. Note that it was like that from the beginning. Finally we got a futon and I would go lie down with him. This was after a year. Now, as a sixteen year old, he has no problem sleeping past noon.
I’d nurse my son, burp him, change him then place him in his Moses basket on top of the dryer, which I turned on to a rumbly cycle. Thanks to the dryer, he’d fall soundly asleep within five minutes. Then I’d move him to his crib, where he slept till morning. The dryer never failed. Of course, it helps if you have your laundry room on the same floor as the bedrooms. I don’t think I’d have carried down to a dryer in the cellar.
Read a great deal about the health hazards of this method before you consider it. This book was designed to create a guilt free way for parents to isolate and ignore their kid when they get too inconvenient and has nothing to do with the welfare of the child.
The most important thing to remember is “this too shall pass.” Kids go through developmental milestones and growth spurts and whatnot sometimes from one week or even one day to the next. While it might be a hassle sometimes you just need to accept that the next week is gonna suck and then things will settle out again.
There was a point, for about a week, where our little one would only settle if we sang a song in 4/4 time. But that was just a week, no big deal.
The trick is to experiment and see what works. No book is going to help you determine what your baby needs to day. Feed 'em when they’re hungry, hold as much as possible and play tag team as often as you can. If it is just you for extended periods hire a baby sitter while you go up and have a nap.
For your current problem I would suggest nursing before bed in a higher stimulation environment. Put on some snappy music and keep moving and talking to him. than lie down with him without nursing for a few minutes. stroke his back, hum or talk quietly. If he is crying for just fussiness sake blow gently on his face briefly. Distraction is your friend. Even if it take 15 or 20 minutes for him to nod off it sounds like that would be an improvement.
I failed to notice Zombification as well.
Maybe it will be useful to somebody anyway.
Oh my god. Someone’s kid died.
In eight years, there were 515 deaths. So about 65 deaths a year.
In 1997, there were about 3,881,000 babies born in the US. This is approximatey 0.0016% of the births.
Yup. 99.9984% of the babies were OK.
BUT SOMEONE DIED! :eek:
This number is dwarfed by the number of babies killed in automobile accidents, but we accept that risk and go on with our lives.
Part of parenting is understanding not everything which seems scary is really so.
After the Fukushima nuclear accident, we took our two kids, (2, and 4 months) down to Taiwan. After it became clear that the greater part of the danger was over, we were considering taking them back. We were in Taipei and the in-laws were driving us somewhere. My wife was very much opposed to taking them back but I pointed out that the in-laws didn’t have a car seat(!) for the kids. You tell me which is more dangerous.
As for crying it out versus not, there really aren’t any good studies done. Some kids are easier than others and so just listening to people give their anecdotal spiels really isn’t helpful.
How do you feel about it? Can you do it? Will the baby respond?
My wife and I co-slept, my wife lost a fair amount of sleep during some periods and I took my turn as well, but that was us.
Man, I saw this and I was all “huh, didn’t know Ruffian had a little baby…?” She don’t, turns out.
Also, BabyWise is child abuse.