The Arbolog |

If you calculate that I have sung Kale to sleep twice a day since he was born (accounting for multiple naps in the early days plus times when Ross put Kale to sleep rather than I, it evens out) , I have sung “You Are My Sunshine” 1080 times, because Friday, Kale was 18 months old.

We’re concentrating on sleep really hard right now, because both Ross and I agree that they way things are just isn’t working. We can’t spend up to 2 hours trying to put Kale to sleep, he can’t continue to only fall asleep in bed with us or in our arms, and we both agree that something has to give. I’ve read in a number of places to pick the thing that bothers you most and work on it, and not to try and fix it all in one go. And it bothers me the most when we are exhausting ourselves to get this kid to bed. So, we’ve started working on getting Kale to fall asleep in his crib this week, with fairly good results. He understands when we say “It’s sleeping time, Kale”, and so the routine has changed. Instead of two books, “You Are My Sunshine”, and an undetermined amount of time snuggling till he falls asleep and then a gentle transfer to the crib, it’s now one book, two short songs (“Twinkle Twinkle” and a single verse and chorus from “You Are My Sunshine”), and then really short cuddling – no more than 15 minutes, and preferably less than 10 – and as soon as he starts to blink and drowse, into the crib he goes. We get him settled in the crib, tuck him in, and we both are trying really hard to walk out while he’s still awake.

Sometimes, it’s so so so so frustrating when you then hear him wake up, stand up, and start to play with the curtains. And so we go back in when that happens, and firmly and quietly place his little butt back into a lying position, get him settled again, remind him “It’s sleeping time, Kale,” and walk out as soon as he’s calm. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. I’m committed to doing this a hundred million times, I guess. It’s time for him to teach himself to go to sleep, to learn to love sleep, to understand the purpose of sleep. I won’t let him cry (although I have seriously considered it a few times recently – especially when we were in High River and it took 2 hours of SCREAMING for him to fall asleep one night. See also: Worst Sleep Night Ever) because sleep isn’t punishment. Sleep is lovely. Sleep is something that every human must have, like air, and food, and water and he should welcome it, and cherish it.

But 18 months is time enough and so here we are.

Where else are we? Well, we aren’t breastfeeding anymore, although I haven’t mourned the loss of that nearly as much as I have mourned the loss of Kale’s hair. Which, although slightly embarrassing, tells me that it was a good time for the breastfeeding to come to a peaceful and amicable end of Kale’s choosing. Kale has a dozen or so words he says, and at least triple that that he understands, if not more. It’s awesome to watch his brain process and choose. I have said it before, and will say it again. I can’t believe we’ve made it here.

I’m scared to write about it because I’m worried that writing about it will make it stop. 

About three weeks ago, Kale randomly started leaving out his 10:30pm feeding. We’d put him to bed at his normal 7ish time and then we’d climb into bed at 10 or 10:30 with the expectation that ANY MINUTE NOW he’d cry out wanting to be fed and then all of a sudden we were waking up and it was 1AM. I didn’t think much of it but when it became the norm I silently congratulated ourselves all around on it just happening very casually, which is really what I was hoping for.

His napping has become fairly predictable – he wants a nap around 11 and another around 3 and he naps for 45 minutes to an hour and a half, most commonly an hour. I’m not too concerned with how long his naps are – if he wakes after only a half an hour, I do try and encourage him to go back to sleep but if it’s anything after 45 minutes then we get up and if he tells me he needs a bit of a cat nap a few hours later, that’s okay too. I don’t really care. We have a routine where he wakes up where we have some hugs and kisses and we open the curtains and blinds together and “look at the world” and I LOVE it when he smiles at what he sees. 

Last night, we put Kale to bed a bit late. He had had a rare 2 hour afternoon nap and so when I left for my pedicure he had his dinner and his bath and was still pretty agreeable and rather than worry about defrosting breastmilk and bottling him and blah blah, he sat up with Ross for a little bit later than normal. When I arrived home at 8, he was definitely sleepy but totally smiley and after a HUGE feeding and a giant burp he was asleep in like, thirty seconds. It’s becoming easier to put him to sleep and easier to transition him from loving arms to the crib. Yay on both counts. 

Kale doesn’t and has never woken up well – he cries out like he’s having a bad dream – and it’s pretty normal for him to have little outbursts a few times in the evening where we go in, replace his sucky, whisper “shhhh, shhhh” and he’s right back to sleep because he wasn’t really awake at all. Sometimes he can self soothe and sometimes if we let it go it will escalate, so he is learning but we aren’t there yet so when we hear a little cry we both stop and listen to see what happens before acting. Last night was no different than normal and I think Ross went in three times. I try and encourage Ross to do that so that Kale doesn’t smell breastmilk and trigger an actual awakening. 

We went to bed at our normal time and all of a sudden it was 5:30AM.

No kidding. 

He slept from 8:30 ish till 5:30 ish. 

Now, I realize this is probably a one-off and that it’s going to be some time before we can reliably say he is sleeping through the night and if he doesn’t for a long time to come I am OKAY with it. I am not going to try crying it out – I feel in my gut that Kale does not release tension by crying like I think some babies do, and I don’t think I am capable of handling that. It’s just not for us. BUT can I get a freakin’ HALLELUJAH here? WOW. SEVEN blissful hours of uninterrupted sleep. I had to pee sooooooo bad when I woke up it wasn’t funny and my breasts were a little achy. BUT MAN DO I FEEL ALERT TODAY. Holy cow.

I feel like I am beating a dead horse here because I started writing a post about sleeping, or, namely, the lack thereof. 

Kale, as I’ve mentioned, hasn’t slept well this past two weeks, but this last few days I discovered a temporary stop-gap to help him get some shut eye. After nursing, there is the rocking and cuddling and patting and stroking his forehead and then gently easing him into the crib. Some sleep experts feel that by doing this he won’t learn to put himself to sleep, but I can’t stand to listen to the moaning and whining and see the red eyes and listen to the tears and the SHEER AGONY. So for now, this works. 

Today, however, the nurse/rock/cuddle/pat/stroke stopped working for whatever reason, so after almost two hours of us going through the cycle of the comforting and then dozing on me and then INSTA-WAKEFULNESS the second I put him into his crib, coupled with frustrated bleats of anger, I tried putting him on his tummy. No sooner had I done that he sighed a content little sigh, his face INSTANTLY relaxed, and he fell easily into sleep. It was like I flipped a switch. 

Will he die from SIDS? Well, experts tend to disagree at what point the risk of SIDS decreases to where it is safe to tummy sleep.  The BC Health Files say that you do not need to force your baby to sleep on their back once they are capable of flipping over. Well thank freakin’ God. Kale is fully capable of flipping over. 

I’ve been in to check on him three times now. All three times he’s relaxed, breathing, and deeply asleep. 

You know, I knew the second I wrote that, he’d wake up. Le sigh.

One of the most common questions Ross and I consistently get asked is “Is he sleeping through the night yet?”

I hate this question.  I feel like I am supposed to answer it with a specific and expected reply and it bugs me that there is even an expectation that Kale should be. Like, somehow we are failing because the answer is no, he is not. That said, it’s an answer I am totally okay with. I honestly don’t expect Kale to sleep through the night for many months to come and I don’t really care. We didn’t sign up for a baby because we wanted to sleep 12 hours a day.

But then you hear about these babies (who I secretly don’t think exist) who suddenly start sleeping through the night at 4 months or something, and their parents proudly proclaim it like their child is a genius and you and your family might as well be idiots since OBVIOUSLY you haven’t figured out the magic secret yet. 

The answer to the sleep question, in my world, should realistically be “of course not” rather than a simple “no”. 

Kale is 5 months old and breastfed. He’s starting spacing out his daytime feedings to about 3 hours consistently and he has usually two naps a day – one at about 11:00AM and one at about 4:00PM. I’ve been trying harder to get those naps down to a more specific time so that he learns a consistent routine, with varying success. Some days his naps are 30 minutes, some days they are 2 hours, and if he wakes in a screeching sort of way, I can usually tell if he needs to sleep more or if he’s done. He’s truly done a nap when he wakes cutely and I can hear him talking to himself – “guyguyguy” – while he waits for me to come and pick him up and play. 

He gets a bath every two nights (he has my dry skin so a bath nightly won’t work for us) and he usually goes to bed for the night at about 7:00 – 7:30PM and will generally sleep till about 11:00PM before wanting a feeding and then another big sleep until about 4:00AM. He’s usually up at about 6:00AM or so when Ross gets up to work and another feeding and then he joins me in bed. We doze and sleep and cuddle and play and sometime around 9:00AM or so, we get up. I get dressed and cleaned up for the day while he plays and chews on his feet or watches, and then its his turn to get dressed and cleaned up. 

If we have errands to run during the day, I plan them for in between the two naps, and if Ross and I have plans to go out for dinner or visiting, Kale still goes to bed at his normal time even if we aren’t at home, usually in a nest of his same blankets and other familiar things. 

I am trying really hard to find a routine, tweak it, and stick to it and to be patient while we all make that routine a habit that we don’t even need to think about. But this past few weeks has been R-O-U-G-H on both Ross and I – sleeping has not been coming easy to Kale and it is a valiant struggle each and every time. We can tell he’s tired and yet he will cry and moan and screech and struggle to stay awake, his little toaster eyes flying open – PING! – like two pieces of toast popping up to tell us that they are done. 

I’m getting tired of it, to be honest. I’m tired of listening to him and feeling so horrid while he cries and I pat trying to soothe him. I’ve tried doing all the normal things that have previously worked – the patting, the shhh-ing, the rubbing. I’ve also tried simply being quiet and laying my hands on him, I’ve tried putting him down and smiling and cheerfully saying “goodnight baby!” and walking away. I’ve tried singing. I sing a lot of lullabies I didn’t even know I knew. 

Some days nothing works, and some days anything would work. We are all over the map. 

Kale’s been working on some big, BIG milestones lately – he’s now actively rolling about and flipping from front to back with no difficulty and this past week he realized how to get his feet under him when he’s on his belly and push his bum up. I know its only a matter of a few short weeks before he figures that out and starts working on crawling. He’s also still teething – or at least, I think he is. Still no teeth. He clutches at his ears now and then and chews chews chews on stuff when its presented to him and his gums are white. But no teeth have popped through. 

When we were home in the very early days, our midwife, Linda, would say to us when things got really hairy here and there as we tried to learn what Kale was telling us:  ”Remember guys, this is Normal Newborn Behaviour“. I keep trying to feel the same way now. This is NORMAL. And I should NOT PANIC. 

I’m resisting googling “sleeping problems” because I am trying really hard to maintain to myself that Kale doesn’t have a sleeping problem. He’s a friggin’ busy 5 month old in the throes of major development. I don’t want to read all sorts of methods for “sleep training” because while I do heartily believe that sleep is a learned skill (just like breastfeeding is), I do NOT believe that you can “train” a baby to magically fall asleep like some pavlovian experiment. I’m resisting asking on any of the online forums I participate in because no one knows Kale the way we do, no one will have the same hunches and instincts about him that I do, and reading suggestion after suggestion after suggestion will only confuse what I already know. 

We have to work through this together, as a family, and we will. I have every confidence that we will. But right now? Ugh, seriously, its HARD to be confident sometimes. Every time someone asks “so is he sleeping through the night yet?” I feel this horrible niggling in the back of my mind that somehow I am missing the boat to dreamland and I really start questioning myself. Parenting has challenged so many things I previously believed about myself. I’m thankful for that, even if I have to remind myself that I am.

I know that there is that whole “Back to Sleep” thing that we are told is the be-all and end-all to prevent SIDS. Mom tells me that I slept on my stomach, because wisdom at that time said stomach sleeping was better. Now, however, we all are supposed to ensure our babies sleep on their backs a la Corpse Pose. However, the rise in flathead syndrome (fancy name: positional plagiocephaly) is, in my non-expert opinion, not a co-incidence. Children nowadays go from sleeping on their backs, to being on their backs in car seats and strollers, and then being put on their backs for playtime. (Stay tuned for a future post about why I think the stroller I bought was the largest waste of $220 ever). Back when I was an infant, we slept on our tummies and then went into the car seats. It was the variety that kept the incidence of flat heads down.

So it’s no surprise that parents today actually have to be told  to put their children onto their stomachs. We also are so geared to the stomach being nothing more than the pit of evil and despair, that parents start thinking that any time, awake or asleep, on the tummy is nothing short of WRONG WRONG WRONG YOU ARE A BAD PARENT AND SHOULD BE REPORTED OR HEXED.

My boy is a side sleeper, like his mama:

From Kale

He sleeps longer and harder than anything else if he is allowed to sleep on his side. Since we breastfeed most frequently using the side-lying position, he will often fall asleep on his side and I often leave him until he awakens shortly afterwards wanting a burp. If put to sleep on his side, either in his bassinet or in a makeshift bed (ours, the couch, etc) he falls asleep faster and will stay asleep for longer. He doesn’t seem to care which side he is placed on.

Don’t get me wrong, we do put him on his back (note Daddy-rigged soother-holder-inner receiving blanket): 

From Kale

 … and he almost always turns his head to that side.

Sidenote: Kale is sporting a footless sleeper from Fig Baby, a local company, made from 95% organic cotton and 5% spandex, and made entirely sweatshop free from “seed to shelf”. I love this sleeper not only for its non-traditional colour, but for the fact that it zips up so it’s “easy access”. The screen-printed image is of a boy jumping on a trampoline and a flock? herd? swarm? (whatever the hell a group of them is called) of butterflies flying across the sky. There are also butterflies on the back, near the nape of his neck. I’ve discovered that footless sleepers are the way to go when you have a long kid and I love the snug fit of this sleeper on Kale – loose clothing that gets all bunched up drives me crazy. Too bad about the $36 (yup, you read that right, for one stinkin’ sleeper) price tag on it, however – holy cripes. Good thing I got mine as part of a huge lot of baby clothes I paid hardly anything for. Huzzah for deals! End sidenote.  

My two Hard and Fast Rules of Parenting (Number one: flexibility and Number two: common sense) tell me that if Kale is a side sleeper and gets better sleep when allowed to sleep on his side, then you know what? That’s how he can sleep. I take precautions to ensure that he doesn’t flop onto his tummy, and he’s a few short weeks from being able to flip himself over, anyway, and then this entire discussion will be moot.

One last photo. You KNOW this is my kid when he’s already flipping up the horns:

From Kale

The number one question that most people seem to ask us about having a newborn is “How is he sleeping?”

Kale is a good sleeper – once he gets there. During the day he is a rather wakeful baby, preferring to hang out and watch stuff rather than sleep a lot. And throughout the night, he sleeps for a good few blocks, generally waking only once in the wee hours of the morning and then up again at 6:30 or so for a snack and backoff to dreamland. Its in this no-man’s land of 6:30 to 9 ish that I tend to get things like laundry done. Sometimes I sleep with Kale because I am feeling like I need a nap, but for the most part, that’s when I check my emails, make a cup of tea, and throw in some laundry. Its amazing how much you can get done early in the morning. its amazing how quiet it is outside.

His favourite sleeping pose is the “surrender pose” – with his arms throw up above his head and if he had his way, I suspect he would sleep on his stomach because whatever chance he gets he likes to be there. But alas, we are a little way away from allowing that so surrender pose it is. He was getting swaddled to sleep the first few weeks. One of the more helpful books I have read is “The Happiest Baby on the Block” (thanks for the tip, Gillian) by Harvey Karp, and the number one recommendation is to swaddle an unhappy baby. But due to the past few weeks of heat and what I think is simply a general distaste for having his arms swaddled, we stopped and the most he gets swaddled now (unless its a meltdown) is waist down, which he generally has kicked off in about 20 minutes. So now we get these hilarious “out like a light” moments with his arms throw up with reckless abandon as he gives himself to sleeping wholeheartedly. Man, I could use a night like that these days, let me tell you.

As we approach that holy grail of the 6 week mark where I am told everything tends to fall into place, there are two issues we are dealing with that can frustrate the beejesus out of me:

One is that I appear to have a rather forceful let down reflex, so at feedings Kale is coughing, sputtering, dripping, and generally struggling to keep up witn the milk flow. I’ve been trying feeding him semi-reclined and that is helping to a degree, but he still needs lots of burping because of all the air he is taking in while trying to keep up.

The other issue is gas. Seriously, if Kale had the ability to speak, he would be saying “I am DYING over here!” every time his little body started the process of moving gas around. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the Internet (I know, I know, world’s worst source for help but in this case its helping) and have been pleasantly surprised at how well bicycling his legs seems to relieve him, as well as massage, rubbing his back, and of course, the obvious back pats.

We also succumbed and bought him a pacifier (which I call a sucky). Because with that all that fast milk, he gets what he needs food wise rather quickly but still wants to suck and I think one of the issues why we have spitting up and lots of gas and fussing at the breast is that he is getting the food he needs but not the comfort sucking he wants, and so he is sucking longer than he comfortably should and paying for it in the end.

So right now, I spend a great deal of time trying to read his signs of being full and then if he is still desperate to suck, offering him his sucky instead of falling for his “I am desperately hungry, please let me suck some more, oh wait, I was wrong, here’s a present – BLARGH!” as the puke hits the floor/bed/my hair/etc.

The sucky, the bicycling of legs, the back pats, the massage, the everything… well, they are working. Thank the stars.

The other question I get asked frequently is “How are those diapers working out?”

Before Kale was born, I made 36 cloth diapers which we used – for two weeks before he grew out of them! Yes, our long torso-ed son (he didn’t get that from me, that’s for sure) is already too long for the diapers that took Ross and I weeks to complete. So, we’re trying out different kinds of other cloth diapers until we find the ones that fit him the best. In the meantime, we are using the dreaded disposable and the G diaper whenever we can. There are flaws with the G diaper, however, the number one being that if they leak (and they do -especially overnight) the little cloth plants get wet or dirty and you only get the cloth pants from the starter set, so you have to buy multiple starter sets (at $40) to get more than two pairs of the little cloth pants. Crap! So right now we are trying Fuzzi Buns and Bum Genius to see how they fit and perform.

I am still committed to cloth diapers – they weren’t hard to use – but now its a matter of finding a commercially available diaper that doesn’t break the bank that is easy to use that fits. And that is no tall order on a squirmy newborn with a long torso.

Since we brought Kale home, Mooki has been sleeping, for the most part, on her bed, which is a pink fleecy round pillow I made her with an old duvet as the stuffing. Before we brought Kale home, she tended to sleep in the most inconvenient places possible – in your crotch on the hottest day of the year, or with her butt pressed up to your face. Ross hated sleeping with Mooki, I on the other hand, tended to secretly invite her up on the bed.

But in any event, Mooki has appointed herself lowest dog in the pack now that we have Kale and as a result, she sleeps in her little bed on the floor in our room instead.

A few nights ago, Ross, Kale, and I retired to bed and I gave Kale a hearty feeding and we all were bunking down. Ross had been particularly tired that day, so he fell asleep as I was feeding Kale. Mooki had been sleeping on my pillow. And so when I was done, I put Kale in his spot between us and attempted to shoo Mooki off the bed – or at least, off my pillow. She apparently was really comfy as she simply scootched farther away and embedded herself in between our pillows. Knowing Ross doesn’t really care for the dog sleeping with us, and knowing he tolerates it because for the most part she sleeps at my feet, I woke him up and asked him to help me move her as she had shuffled too far away for me to pick her up and I would have had to lean over Kale to do so.

I guess he was really tired because he said “whatever” and promptly dropped right back off to sleep.

Okay, I figured.

We woke up the next morning and Ross took one look at Mooki and said “Moo, what are you doing on the bed up here?” I guess he didn’t remember the conversation, so I reminded him that I had given him the opportunity to remove her.

She sneakily and lovingly looked at us. I guess in her mind, disguising oneself as a pillow is the surest way to get the best spot on the bed.