the hawkins family: sleep

This post is dedicated to something I hold very near and dear to my heart: sleep. There have been several sleep changes in William's world in the past few days, and I am hoping that things are starting to level off again. (fingers crossed for mom and dad's sakes!) If you read the post about Will's 4 month check-up, you know that he has been waking up for 2 nighttime feedings for a little over a month now. His pediatrician said that Will does not need to be eating twice during the night, and we would all be happier and more rested if we cut out the first nighttime feeding, which was occurring about 1 or 2 am. Since this feeding was a habit instead of a necessity, the doctor recommended that we work with Will to break the habit by using a modified "cry it out" method. Not complicated - basically using increasing intervals of time in which we leave Will alone to cry (insert frowny face here), in hopes that he will teach himself to fall asleep on his own when he wakes up during the night.

We decided to start the sleep training this last weekend. Let me tell you - it is NOT easy to listen to (and watch) your baby cry, even for a few minutes, knowing that you could easily fix it. So night #1 went as expected - Will woke up about 11:30 and we let him put himself back to sleep, which didn't really take that long (maybe because he wasn't expecting to eat yet?). Then he woke up at 12:45 and going back to sleep took quite a bit longer, but he did it! He woke up a couple more times that night, but all was going well. Until....at some point during his awake time, he taught himself how to do this:

That's right - Will is now an EXTREMELY proficient back to front roller. As soon as he learned this little trick, he became very proud of himself, and now he pretty much refuses to sleep on his back.

He wants to sleep like this:

So, when I look on the monitor at night, I see something like this:

Soooooo....the first time I looked at the monitor and saw Will on his stomach was about 4:30am on Saturday morning. After skyrocketing out of bed and running in to make sure he was alive, I rolled him back onto his back, and he immediately rolled back to his tummy. Stubborn little man. He absolutely refused to sleep on his back for the rest of that night, and I was a nervous wreck about it because he was still swaddled. I was super-worried that he wouldn't be able to roll back over if he needed to without the full use of his arms, but that he wouldn't be able to sleep without being swaddled. Ugh.

And this is how we turned "eliminate nighttime feeding" training into "eliminate nighttime feeding AND swaddling" training. Fun.

So for night #2 of this sleep-depriving adventure, we put Will to bed with his arms out. Instead of going completely cold turkey, I cut arm holes in his woombie so he would still have just a little bit of what he was used to. This added an entirely new level to our nighttime experience, because although Will now LOVES rolling onto his stomach, he seems to have forgotten how to roll back over most of the time, so sometimes he gets frustrated during the night when he is on his stomach. Since our little training method says, "Do not pick up the baby or you will lose all the progress you've made so far," we had an interesting situation on our hands. Do we go in and roll him back over when he cries? Should we let him figure it out on his own? Stick to the plan? Modify the plan? Yipes!

Needless to say, we have had a few interesting nights. But! We are making progress! We decided to continue with one nighttime feeding (around 4-5 am), since Will now goes to bed around 7:30 or 8 every night. I'm happy to report that last night, he woke up a few times between 8pm and 4am, but put himself back to sleep each time with no more than 5-10 minutes of fussing, and sometimes none at all. He is doing well with having his arms free during the night, and he now sleeps on his back sometimes and his stomach sometimes. I've pretty much gotten over my initial fear of the stomach sleeping, since everyone tells me that if he's strong enough to roll himself over, he's going to be OK. (It took lots of people telling me that LOTS of times before I could break myself of the fear!)

All in all, I'm very proud of how well Will has adapted to all of these changes. When he first started rolling over in his crib, I was really not pleased with the timing, but now I think that maybe it was actually a good thing. If we have to suffer through a few nights of no sleep while working on the feeding thing, we might as well knock out the swaddling too, right? I'm not sure if the swaddling habit would have been easier to break when he's older, but we really didn't have a choice!

Tonight will be night #4, and I've heard that it typically takes 3-5 nights to develop new sleeping habits. I hope that is true!

So for those of you who have made it this far into this extremely long post, here are a few recent pictures of our little monkey.

He loves to be sitting up: