How we got our baby to sleep through the night

Posted to: parenting, howto

I was putting Z to bed the other night and got to thinking how lucky we are that the kid is now sleeping without any problems whatsoever, knock on wood. He is six months old, so this is basically "normal" -- meaning that, biologically and developmentally speaking, all six-month-olds should be able to go seven hours or so at night without waking up to eat -- but it doesn't go without saying. I have friends whose babies started sleeping ten hours at a stretch when they were ten weeks old, then suddenly at six months started torturing their parents by waking up every ninety minutes during the night. If you've never experienced this, it's agony.

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The title of this post is a little deceptive, because I don't really feel like we knew what we were doing. Early on, Zeke slept irregularly at night, wouldn't nap consistently, and had what I now think is a pretty mild case of colic. It was rough on all of us. The reason I think I can take some of the credit is because back in May, when I started staying home with him, I decided that I was going to deal with the nap situation decisively. I'd read in Marc Weissbluth's book and in the Baby Whisperer that "good sleep begets good sleep." In other words, the better rested your baby is, the better he or she will sleep at night. This has the counterintuitive consequence that putting your baby to bed earlier will sometimes mean he will sleep later in the morning. I can't vouch for that one definitively, though I attest that putting our baby to sleep later at night did not mean he slept later in the morning. The point though is that in order to get him sleeping well at night, he has to take good naps in the day. This made intuitive sense to me.

So, I started reading everything I could on naps. The upshot was that I did several things:

1. Move him from a co-sleeping arrangement to a crib. He actually seemed to like the crib better, which surprised me. Emotionally, this was toughest on my wife, who was just going back to work and really missed the nighttime closeness. I know family bed and co-sleeping advocates make a convincing case, but this really seemed to work better for Z.
   
2. Put him down for naps during the day as soon as he started to appear sleepy. Anticipate that he would get sleepy after having been awake for ninety to 120 minutes, and have everything prepared.
   


3. Put him down awake. The point is that he needs to learn to go to sleep by himself. My strategy was to catch him as he started to get sleepy, wind him down and relax him, and then as he was really getting ready to nod off, lay him in his crib and let him finish the process on his own. He had gotten used to sucking his thumb by this point, so that helped. This was probably the toughest part. I spent a lot of time putting him down, letting him start to fuss and cry, then picking him up and trying to calm him again, then putting him down before he fell asleep ... and then repeating the process over and over again.
   




Creepy lovey from Carter's



4. Give him a "lovey," as Brazelton calls it. His is a fairly creepy (I think) little thing, but it works, so who cares. Someone gave it to us. It's a white teddy bear head sewn onto a white blanket with the inscription "If they could just stay little" (photo at right). It's made by Carter's and similar products are available here. Brazelton says babies should choose a lovey, but Z didn't; we presented him with this and he seemed to like it. Now, every time we put him to bed in his crib, we lay out the lovey to his right, and he immediately rolls over on his right side, sticks his thumb in his mouth, and flops the other hand on top of the bear head. It's cute.
   


Receiving blanket from Under the Nile



5. Swaddle tightly from the waist down. They say six months is too old for swaddling, but I am loath to stop doing it. He's so active, though, that he can wriggle out of the swaddle whenever he decides to, so maybe it's no big deal. For this you want to use a big receiving blanket. The best ones I've been able to find (also hand-me-downs) are from Miniwear, but I couldn't find any links. These are big lightweight cotton, so they are OK for hot weather, and they have the right kind of surface texture for good swaddling. They are about 36" square or bigger. Another good one is from Under the Nile. Very expensive ($34) organic cotton, and a little on the warm side for summer, but nice.
   
6. Develop a completely consistent and predictable bedtime routine. Ours doesn't vary much between daytime naps and nighttime sleep. It goes like this:
   
   • First, a diaper change (if necessary). Use plenty of A&D ointment.
     
   • Second, dim the lights and close the shades.
   
   
   
   • Third, if it is nighttime, read three books, at least one of which is very familiar: Goodnight Moon, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, or an old favorite of mine, Black and White, a great, rhythmical poem about sleeping, dreaming, and friendship from 1963 (it's out of print). If it is daytime, move on to the next step.
     
   • Sing a lullaby. The one I always use is an old traditional American one:

   
   

   Hush-a-bye, don't you cry,
   
   Go to sleepy little baby.
   
   When you wake, you shall take
   
   All the pretty little ponies.
   
   Blacks and bays, dapples and grays,
   
   All the pretty little ponies.

   
   

   • Then, while singing, swaddle him tightly.
   
   
   • Pat his back and walk him around the room until he begins to look ready to drop off.
   
   
   • Lay him in bed with his eyes open. Stand there alternately singing, shushing, and patting or stroking him until he is at the very edge of sleep, then back off and let him fall asleep.
   
   

For me, this works like magic almost every time, unless he is gassy or I have really misjudged how sleepy he is (or kept him up too long). He usually sleeps straight through.

There are lots of books you can buy on this subject, which testifies to inexperienced parents' feelings of desperation and helplessness. I bought or was given several: Marc Weissbluth's Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, Ferber's classic Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, the newer, attachment-parenting-oriented The No-Cry Sleep Solution by Elizabeth Pantley (we actually bought this one), Dr. Sears's Nighttime Parenting (all attachment, all the time -- advocates co-sleeping, endorsed by La Leche League Int'l.), plus the ever-popular Happiest Baby on the Block by Harvey Karp, which focuses more on soothing strategies for newborns (under three months), with the famous five S's (swaddling, shushing, side-holding, swinging, and sucking, in that order). Tracy Hogg, author of Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems, has a great deal of advice about sleep, too. What consistently interests me about this is that it always seems to come down to a question of strictness on the one hand versus nurturance on the other. If you can't stand to hear your child cry and want to "rescue" him, you'll find Pantley and Sears appealing. If you think your child has to learn independence, you'll go with Ferber, Weissbluth, and Hogg. My personal reactions to the books are: I didn't find Ferber or Sears particularly useful. Weissbluth was extremely informative about the science of infant sleep and its relation to development, and he convinced me that naps were paramount -- which is borne out by my experience to date. Hogg has solid practical strategies for "working on" (especially lengthening) naps and a great deal of common sense advice about general practices around sleeping. And Pantley offers some comfort to stressed, tired parents who don't want to believe that more crying (a la Ferber) is the only answer to their problems. Of course, there's scads of advice online too. The best (probably because I agree with him, mostly) blog posting I came across in my journeys was from Glennlog, but there must be others.



Some tips to remember:

• He is in the process of learning to sleep on his own. He will wake up; we all do. The biggest challenge for him is how to fall back to sleep without your intervention (feeding, rocking, etc.) You will need to learn to distinguish between the cries you hear while he sleeps: some mean "I'm awake and am not going back to sleep," but most don't require you do rush in and "rescue" him. Unless you're positive that he's in pain or something, give him the opportunity (at least a minute or two) to calm himself and to go back to sleep.
  


• At three months, Z would only take naps if cradled in someone's arms. He napped quite well under these circumstances, but obviously this wasn't a workable long-term arrangement. Sometimes he could fall asleep while being held and then be put down, but then when he woke up, he would be inconsolable. The challenge was getting him to accept being put down to sleep in a crib by himself without having that frighten him to the point where he became agitated and unable to calm himself. This took a lot of patience. Be prepared for this to be the toughest transition with regard to sleep.


• Similarly, he used to wake up after only 45 minutes every single time. You could literally set your watch by it, no joke. I started swooping in at 45 minutes and instantly beginning to shush him all over again, as if the nap were just beginning. After a week or so of this, he began waking up at 45 minutes, fussing for a few minutes, then falling asleep again on his own. Now he usually sleeps in multiples of 45 minutes -- naps usually last either 45, 90, or 135 minutes.


• He actually seemed to like his crib a lot, considerably better than co-sleeping, though he loves to cuddle. Don't assume that your baby will hate his crib and that you are imposing a hardship on him by putting him in there; that can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.


• Getting a 20-pound baby swaddled can be tricky. I worked out a trick for laying out the swaddling blanket with one hand while holding Z with the other: grab two adjacent corners of the blanket bunched together with one hand, lay the blanket down so that it makes a diagonal line across a matress, then separate the corners and spread the whole thing out. Hard to describe. If I were smarter, I would just lay out the swaddling blanket every time he woke up from a nap in preparation for the next one.