I Guess Sleep Training is Not Not Working?

We’ve been committed to sleep training for about a week and a half and have definitely seen some improvement, but it’s definitely not been a miracle. A lot of people promise it will be better by the third night. Those people probably have normal children, not demon children who would prop their eyelids open with toothpicks to stay awake just one more hour if they had the hand-eye coordination to do so.

After a week and a half of sleep training, we’ve continued to have okay, not great nights. We’ve put her in her crib awake every night. Some nights she goes to bed without even a fuss. Some nights she fusses or cries for 15-20 minutes. She feeds 2-3 times a night, which is not terrible, but I can still count the number of times I’ve had four continuous hours of sleep since she was born on two hands. Sometimes she wakes up an hour or two after bedtime and we have to let her cry a bit before she goes back to sleep.

Look Who Bought Herself a 1 Way Ticket to Cry-It-Outsville

After several nights of “A.” waking up every 2 hours at night, we’ve officially hit the 4 month sleep regression.

I took her to the doctor, who ruled out teething, an ear infection, or any other obvious cause of her frequent nightwaking. The doctor confirmed what I feared – she had grown so dependent on nursing to sleep that she couldn’t get back to sleep on her own.

I’d been working really hard over the past two months to get her to go down sleepy but awake. It seemed like we had made some progress, but when she failed to fall asleep after a few minutes of crying I usually went in and nursed her again until she fell asleep. That was only reinforcing the problem.

Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part III: Car Hell

NOTE: Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part I: Packing can be found here and Part II: Surviving the Sleepocalypse can be found here.

After finishing our long car trip with our 4 month old daughter A., I confess that I have a bit of PTSD. She hasn’t slept as well as at home, but it hasn’t been a disaster. I haven’t forgotten anything major yet. However, the first leg of the car trip produced a solid 3 hours of screaming until she finally fell asleep.

I’m happy to say the return trip was a lot better. Here are some things we learned that helped our drive back go a lot more smoothly:

Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part II: Surviving the Sleepocalypse

NOTE: Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part I: Packing can be found here and Part III: Car Hell can be found here.

My daughter A. has never been a very good sleeper. First she had her days and nights mixed up (common for a newborn), then she cluster fed like crazy and wanted to eat all night long, then she had tummy issues, and right as we were finally resolving those she hit the 4 month sleep regression. Suddenly she was fighting sleep like crazy and all naps topped out at 45 minutes again.

This week we finally got some relief as she settled into one night waking (yay) and her naps started to lengthen again (double yay). And so, of course, this is the week we are traveling for Thanksgiving.

Along with packing for the trip, I have been desperately researching and planning ways to avoid completely screwing up my daughter’s sleep. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part I: Packing

NOTE: Traveling with a 4 Month Old, Part II: Surviving the Sleepocalypse, can be found here and Part III: Car Hell can be found here.

This Thanksgiving, we are taking a major car trip with our 4 month old baby, “A”. While we’ve flown with her before, this is our first car trip, and our longest trip to date.

We have an ambitious trip planned – you could call it the show off the new baby tour – that involves swinging through Connecticut, Brooklyn, Long Island, New Jersey, and Rochester. Clearly, we were out of our minds when we planned this, but too late to go back now.

After much deliberation, I compiled an exhaustive list of everything that we could possibly need. Now I just have to figure out how to cram it into my Toyota Corolla.

We Started Solids!

As I promised, we started solids on Monday, when my daughter A. turned four months old. I debated about what her first meal would be, but I settled on applesauce, mostly because we had a jar of unsweetened applesauce already open in our fridge.

I got her set up in the high chair with a bib, took out a little bit of applesauce, microwaved it for a few seconds so it wasn’t too cold, and gave her a taste…and she hated it! She made some pretty awesome faces in the process of spitting it out.

A.’s 4 Month Doctor Visit

Today was A.’s 4 month doctor visit!

She is now 25 1/2 inches long (88th percentile) and 13 pounds, 15 ounces (43rd percentile). This was a big jump in her weight, which is good, but it might be overstated since she was wearing a pretty wet cloth diaper at the time compared to a disposable the last time she was weighed.

The doctor said she looked strong and healthy and that she would likely be an early crawler because she is so strong on her tummy. I know some babies hate tummy time, but A. has always loved it, at least until she gets tired of holding up her head.

The doctor also said she actually seemed ready for rice cereal since she was holding her head up well, has been very hungry recently, and isn’t sleeping through the night. She suggested giving her a little rice cereal just once a day at dinner. She also said they recommend brown rice cereal.

A. is 4 Months Old!

I can’t believe my baby girl is already 4 months old! 1/3 of a year – holy cow, I am definitely not ready for this. My tiny, sleepy newborn is already a playful little girl.

I have decided to refer to her as “A.” on this blog rather than using her real name so that she can’t hate me when she is a teenager. Or at least she can’t hate me for writing about her poop on the Internet – I’m sure she’ll find other reasons!

Tomorrow we’re going to the doctor and will find out how big she is. She is really filling out well since her 2 month visit and is eating like crazy this week so I’m guessing she will be around 14 pounds.

When to Introduce Solids?

There’s an old joke that if you ask a question to two Jews, you get three answers. I feel like there’s a similar conundrum when it comes to solids – you ask two pediatricians, you get three answers. My pediatrician told me we could introduce fruits and veggies at 4 months but should wait until 6 months before giving her rice cereal. Others say the exact opposite – start with cereal. The American Academy of Pediatrics says to wait until “around 6 months.” And advocates of Baby Lead Weaning say to skip cereal and other purees entirely and just feed the baby what you eat.

Baby Lead Weaning appeals to me and I plan to shift toward it as my daughter gets older. However, she is about to turn four months and I decided to give solids a try for a few reasons: