Alida is now 4.5 months old, sleeping through the night, and almost on a daily napping schedule. When she turned 4 months old and we went to her well-child check up, once again I vented to Dr. Staker about how hard it was! Last time at her 2 month check up she was fussy all the time and he helped me figure out she was just hungry! We started giving her supplementary bottles but ultimately I figured out it was the nipple shield I was using to help her latch that was interfering with my supply. So we stopped using that and things normalized out again. But still, she would wake up every 2 hours at night to nurse, and want to nurse every hour to 1.5 hours during the day and I was just getting worn out!
Well, Dr. Staker did what he does so well and gave me a simple solution- or rather permission to do what I'd been wanting to do but felt shamed to by all the attachment parenting articles about the harm of letting your baby cry. He told me she is definitely old enough now to make it through the whole night without feeding, her body is just in the habit of being fed at those times so we just need to break the habit. He said it will be hard and she'll cry maybe even for up to an hour. But that eventually she would learn how to put herself to sleep without nursing and her body would reset to allow her to sleep through the night. He said it would take about 3-5 days. But what is 3-5 days compared to the chaos that my life has been getting up every 2 hours every night?! I felt so relieved to finally have permission to influence the situation. And I trust him. I trust the pediatric doctor with years and years of experience over all of the crazy mommy wars that make you feel ashamed for EVERYTHING!
So we did it. After Grandma Schoening left (more about that later) we moved her into her own room, and let her cry out each of her feedings, one at a time. First the 12:30am feeding- and she cried for a good while, probably 45 minutes. You definitely don't get any sleep while you wait for your baby to stop crying. What an awful, stressful time. But she finally did go to sleep again, and I fed her again at 5:30am. The next night we she acatually slept through the 12:30am feeding time all the way til 2:30, but then let her cry it out for that one. Again another 45 minutes or so, but eventually went to sleep again. The next night she slept from 8pm all the way until 5:30am. It was a miracle!! And it worked just as Dr. Staker suggested. I decided to enjoy the new found sleep for a few days to make sure the habit stuck before weaning her off her last early feeding. So I tried to get her to sleep through her 5:30am feeding, but I realized that just might be too long. She goes to bed now between 7 and 8pm and 12 hours might just be too long for her and me to go without feeding for my milk supply. So I've decided to compromise and get up early and feed her at 6am and nurse her back to sleep and then she'll usually sleep til 8. And I'm pretty happy with those results. Going from waking up every 2-3 hours and no real routine, to now sleeping all the way through the night consistently is a miracle for me. Now I'm just trying to figure out a reasonable nap schedule for her because she wakes up early from naps too (like after 30 minutes) even when she's still tired. So I think I'll have her take a nap at 11am and again at 2pm, and let her cry it out if she needs to. Because ultimately, she needs sleep and I know she feels so much better when she does sleep. She just needs help figuring out how to do it.
I though that I would be a totally crunch attachment parenting mamma because of my studies and experience with attachment disorder. But I think I've decided that the attachment parenting movement is a little too extreme. The underlying premise is that the baby knows best what he/she needs, and we as parents need to follow their lead. Well I just don't believe that. I believe that kids need gentle guidance. It's a combination of both guidance and knowing what to expect, and enough room to allow them to express their autonomy as well. But infants do NOT know how to organize their sleep on their own. Yes, the learn eventually, but there is no harm in helping them. And there is a LOT of worse things in the world than a baby crying. I don't believe the experience elevated cortisol levels and feel abandoned and give up on the idea that someone will help when they live in a home surrounded by loving parents that take care of them all day. In an abusive home or situation? Sure, this could be the case. But I know my daughter still knows I love her, even if she has to cry sometimes. And ultimately, my (and her) health and safety is on the line when I feel so sleep deprived and desperate that I can't hold it together to take care of her right. I don't think there's any amount of baby crying that can equal in gravity the sanity of a mother struggling to survive. There are worse things than crying. I will say that over and over and over again. I am a believer in sleep training and believe the short-term grief of them crying for a day or two is FAR outweighed by the benefit to both them and me of having full and restful sleep. Alida is a MUCH happier baby now that she sleeps through the night. We both feel rested and happy when we wake up and that's a formula for a good life.
Anyway, who ever knew that my life would revolve around a baby's sleep habits. But that has truly been my whole world. Chaos. Finally we have some sanity in the house.
Other areas of child development that we still haven't figured out- getting Levi to eat healthy meals and not just milk and sweets. I think I need to read more and figure out my philosophy about this, but I think ultimately it's going to go like this. You have to eat what's at the table when it's served to you or there's nothing else. Unfortunately he's too young to understand this right now so I think I'm going to wait a little bit longer on that. I think we're going to feed Alida JUST vegetables the first year of life so he has an actual chance at not getting diabetes at age 8. I think it might already be too late for Levi. He's our burnt pancake. He got sugar way too young and now that's all the wants. But he does sleep like a champ. He was sleeping through the night at like 6 weeks, and he still takes a 2-3 hour nap every day at the same time. I love it. He made me think I was a good parent but turns out he was just an easy child. Ha :)
Ok so some highlights since March that I'll write about in other posts:
- Homesteading nights on Beekeeping by me, and Goats/Raw Milk by April Bird
- Michael's 37th birthday
- March- the month of milk chocolate and coming of spring!
- We re-started out chicken flock with 12 new chicks- 2 Buff Orpington's, 1 Barred Rock, 1 Mystery chick that was supposed to be a Barred Rock that turned out to be a rooster :/, 1 Black laced Wyondotte, 2 Rhode Island Reds, 1 Well-Summer, and 4 Americaunas, the Easter Egg laying breed. It will be fun to have brown and green eggs!
- We ordered honey bees and decided to foray into that
- We decided to get baby goats- we have 2 Nigerian Dwarf does coming to us at the end of the month
- This year we had record snow fall and got stuck in our own driveway several times because of the depth of the snow drifts. So the warming of the March weather meant even more
- We decided to fly Grandma Schoening out for a week to get to know her great grandchildren and especially Alida, whom we named after her (Antonia Alida Hartman)
- We spent a week in Bicknell for Spring Roundup but Michael stayed home to help his dad on the farm instead of going to the Henry mountains because he recently had carpal tunnel surgery on his hand and needed help changing sprinklers while everyone else was gone.
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