You may have noticed that my last post disappeared and that I was planning on ramping up my posting, which has not happened. This is because a birth relative of the baby is seeking placement of her.  Some details are better left offline for a while.

But, there are some topics that are so generic that I feel I can post about my experience. Sleeplessness, yes! I have a whole crew of infant mom friends and we are all talking about it, working on it and dealing with it every day.  The moments that we are not thinking about it are joyous, indeed.

I read the book “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child”, which I loved and really changed how I do things.  Sleep improved immediately and within a month was fantastic. We had removed the swing and the swaddle and the kid was only getting up once in the night. After being up most of the night for 3 months of an underweight and colicky baby, this was an amazing step for us. A number of times, I even put her down awake below her mobile and she put herself to sleep. Wow, that wasn’t so bad!

I imagined this kid to be a great learner, a self-soother and to be, just generally, a good sleeper.  I read on a message board yesterday, something like this, “They tell you that your kid should start sleeping “through the night” at around 4 months. What they don’t tell you is that it won’t last.”

As her energy and alertness has increased, she has been fighting sleep more and more. Catching her at the right time is tricky business. One minute, she is happily playing and exploring her toys, the next, she is letting out manic screeches that indicate she is tired and wanting to stay awake.  We are still experimenting with the best way to bring her back down, a walk almost always does it. Usually if we try to put her to sleep when she first exhibits signs of tiredness, it is not to a good end. Unfortunately, this is not only true for naps, but also in her middle of the night waking.

So, we have slowly added back things that used to help her sleep that she didn’t need for a while. Her swaddle, her cushy bouncy seat and the last two nights even her swing.  Our doctor suggested that it was time to start letting her fuss for 5 minutes to help her learn to put herself to sleep, but we can’t really handle it and it is hard to imagine sleep actually happening in 5 minutes. The fussing seems to just work her up even more.

The hardest time is the afternoon. She pretty much refuses to go down for her afternoon nap unless she is so wiped out that she passes out.  We try everything and it always seems that she just wants to stay awake in an overtired state.

The bright side is that (in part because of the sleep training that I learned in the aforementioned book), she has one nap a day that is quite long.  I think she is on a quest to come down to two naps a day and this is the cause of this sleep havoc.  But, once that stabilizes, I am now quite certain there will be something else.