The No-cry Sleep Solution (26 page)

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Mother-Speak

“I think one of the most helpful ideas was to put him down when he was tired but awake—he surprised me by allowing it so often!”

Judith, mother of three-month-old Harry

So you see, over the first few months of life, you can gradually and lovingly help your baby learn how to fall asleep without your help. And you can do this without tears (yours or his).

What About Thumb and Finger Sucking?

If your baby falls asleep sucking her fingers, this is an entirely different situation from using a bottle, pacifier, or the breast. If your baby has to find comfort in sucking her fingers, she is learning to control her own hands and will not always depend on someone else to help her. Current philosophies disagree as to whether letting a baby get into this habit is a good idea, but most experts agree that letting a young baby suck her own fingers poses no harm. The biggest problem, as you may expect, is that some babies don’t give up the habit at any age, and you eventually have to step in.

Waking for Night Feedings

Many pediatricians recommend that parents shouldn’t let a newborn sleep longer than three or four hours without feeding, and the vast majority of babies wake far more frequently than that.

(Remember, too, that there are a few exceptional babies who can go longer.) No matter what, your baby
will
wake up during the night. (See Chapter 2.) The key is to learn when you should pick her up for a night feeding and when you can let her go back to sleep on her own.

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This is a time when you need to really focus your instincts and intuition. This is when you should try very hard to learn how to read your baby’s signals.

Here’s a tip that I am amazed to have never read in a baby book, but is critically important for you to know. Babies make many sleeping sounds, from grunts to whimpers to outright cries, and these noises don’t always signal awakening. These are what I call sleeping noises, and your baby is nearly or even totally asleep during these episodes. These are not the cries that mean,

“Mommy, I need you!” They are just sleeping sounds. I remember when my first baby, Angela, was a newborn sleeping in a cradle next to my bed. Her cry awakened me many times, yet she was asleep in my arms before I even made it from cradle to rocking chair to sit down. She was making sleeping noises. In my desire to respond to my baby’s every cry, I actually taught her to wake up more often!

You need to listen and watch your baby carefully. Learn to differentiate between sleeping sounds and awake and hungry sounds.

If she is really awake and hungry, you’ll want to feed her as quickly as possible. If you do respond immediately when she is hungry, she will most likely go back to sleep quickly. But, if you let her cry escalate, she will wake herself up totally, and it will be harder and take longer for her to go back to sleep. Not to mention that
you
will then be wide awake, too!

Listen carefully when your baby makes night noises:

If she is making sleeping noises—let her sleep.

If she really is waking up—tend to her quickly.

For Breastfeeding or Co-Sleeping Mothers

As I was researching this book, it became obvious to me that a great many new mothers spend part or all of their nights sleeping with their babies. (If you are part of this group, please review

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the section on safe co-sleeping starting on page 37.) When you breastfeed and co-sleep with your baby, your sleep cycles will probably become synchronized. This means that you will both experience midcycle awakenings at the same time. When this happens, it is a beautiful sign that you and your baby have found perfect sleep harmony; and it will make your night waking easier, because when your baby wakes you won’t be roused from a state of deep sleep. It is easy for you, in your partially awake state, to attach your baby to your breast, and then, when your baby easily falls back to sleep, so do you.

Dr. James J. McKenna, director of the Mother Baby Behavioral Sleep Center at the University of Notre Dame, in an article for The Natural Child Project website says:

My colleagues and I observed mother-infant pairs as they slept both apart and together over three consecutive nights. Using a poly-graph, we recorded the mother’s and infant’s heart rates, brain waves (EEGs), breathing, body temperature, and episodes of nursing.

Infrared video photography simultaneously monitored their behavior.

We found that bed-sharing infants face their mothers for most of the night, and that mother and infant are highly responsive to each other’s movements, wake more frequently, and spend more time in lighter stages of sleep than they do while sleeping alone. Bed-sharing infants nurse almost twice as often, and three times as long per bout, as they do when sleeping alone. But they rarely cry. Mothers who routinely sleep with their infants get at least as much sleep as mothers who sleep without them.

During the night, when both you and your baby are in your brief awakening periods, he may simply breathe noisily or move around, and you’ll automatically attach him to the breast; the two of you will both drift back off to sleep. This is a wonderful, peaceful experience when you have a newborn lying beside you, and can be a new mother’s best solution for much-craved sleep.

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But beneath the surface of this peaceful scenario lies a problem. Your baby will come to expect a nursing at every brief awakening. And if you recall from Chapter 2, which described basic sleep facts, (you
did
read that, right?) your baby has a brief awakening every hour or so all night long. While you may find this arrangement acceptable for the early newborn months, it’s a very rare mother who will still be enjoying it ten or twelve months later.

Sleeping Noises

The key is to get your co-sleeping baby to feel comfortable sleeping next to you without having to order from Mommy’s all-night snack bar every hour! The important concept for obtaining this balance is described in the section called Waking for Night Feedings on pages 75–76. As I describe there, babies make a wide assortment of sleeping noises. Not all of these mean, “I’m awake and want to nurse.” A co-sleeping mother’s best long-term sleep enhancer is to learn how to pretend to be asleep while listening to Baby’s sounds. And to wait. Your baby just may fall back to sleep without your help. If she needs to breastfeed, you’ll know that soon enough.

Help Your Baby Distinguish Day from Night

A newborn baby sleeps about sixteen to eighteen hours per day and this sleep is distributed evenly over six to seven brief sleep periods. You can help your baby distinguish between nighttime and daytime sleep, and thus help him sleep longer periods at night.

Begin by having your baby take his daytime naps in a lit room where he can hear the noises of the day, perhaps a bassinet or cradle located in the main area of your home. Make nighttime sleep dark and quiet. This means no talking, singing, or lights in

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the middle of the night. If your home is noisy after baby’s bedtime, use white noise to cover up the sounds of the family. White noise can be soft background music, the hum of a heater or fan (safety precautions taken), or any other steady sound. You can even purchase small clock radios with white-noise functions (they sound like spring rain or a babbling brook), or cassette tapes with quiet nature sounds or even sounds from the womb.

You can also help your baby differentiate day naps from night sleep by using a nightly bath and a change into pajamas to signal the difference between the two.

Keep your nighttime feedings quiet and mellow. There’s no need to talk or sing to your little one in the middle of the night; save all that for daytime.

Nighttime Bottle-Feeding with Ease

If you are bottle-feeding your baby, make sure that everything you need for night feeding is close at hand and ready to use. Your goal is for baby to stay in a sleepy stage and nod right back off to sleep. If you have to run to the kitchen to prepare a bottle, while baby fusses or cries, you’ll just bring both of you to the point of being wide awake, and what may have been a brief night waking will turn into a long period of wakefulness.

Nighttime Diapers

If your baby is waking every hour or two during the night, you don’t have to change her diaper every time. Again, remembering back to when Angela was a newborn and I was a “newmom,” I dutifully changed her every hour or two when she woke up.

Oftentimes I was changing one dry diaper for a new one. I eventually learned that I was more “tuned in” to the diaper issue than she was!

I suggest that you put your baby in a good-quality nighttime diaper, and when she wakes, do a quick check. Change her only

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if you have to, and do it as quickly and quietly as you can in the dark. Use a tiny night-light when you change the baby, and avoid any bright lights that can signal daytime. Have your changing supplies organized and close to Baby’s bed, and make sure you use a warm cloth to wipe that sleepy bottom. (Check into the many available types of baby-wipe warmers, and keep one near your nighttime changing station.)