Napping the Attached Baby

We don't hold Lily to any specific schedule.  It has really helped us to watch her, observe her cues, and help her get to a nap when she's showing us that she is tired enough to sleep.  A word that gets tossed around a lot is "routine" and that is something we definitely do have.

About four months ago, I was searching for baby sleep help when I wound up in a Babycenter.com forum about teaching your baby to sleep. That sounded great. If it was something I was or wasn't doing, I could quickly change that.  I quickly discovered that this was yet another version of the "cry it out" method, which while some parents swear by it, is not in line with our attachment parenting philosophy.  That, and Lily would have no part in it anyway.  She'd tell me right where to stick it.  But, there was one glorious take-away from my short stint in the teaching your baby to sleep realm: The Sleep/Wake Time Chart.  From the various readings on baby sleep, the members of this particular Babycenter.com forum collaboratively created a chart that made it easy to see the average number and length of sleep and wake times.

This is a link to the public/shared collaborative document.  It is really cool, because I keep checking back to find more changes based on information people have thought to add.  Below is an embedded copy of the one I saved in my Google Docs.  I use the whole chart for a loose reference, and I completely ignore the recommended time before responding to night wakings.  Lily is not yet capable of putting herself back to sleep most of the time.  Being a high need baby, it will escalate very quickly.  Within a minute, she will be wide awake and it will take an hour to get her back to sleep.

Better Observe Tired Cues

When I first looked at this chart, Lily had needed to have 4 solid naps.  We were letting her get overtired.  We needed to better observe her nap cues, which we were not doing at all.  She was not getting enough naps.  We had been just letting her fall asleep whenever she naturally did instead of realizing that we now needed to help her sleep when she was giving us clear clues.

When Lily needs a nap, she's cranky.  She will be quick to fuss if left down on her own.  She will rub her face, rub her eyes, and pull her ears.  Her eyes get red and squinty.  She has this pitiful kind of whiny cry that we know is her sleep cry.  Now that she's more mobile, she starts crawling all over everything.  She wants to be up, now down, now on grandma, now on mommy, now on daddy, now over here, now over there. It's a combination of those cues.  At first, we had to really study her to figure out when she was tired.  Now, we've got it down.

Trouble Getting To Nap = Probably Need To Drop Nap

When we had trouble getting her to nap for consecutive days a couple of months ago, we took that as a cue that she needed to transition from 4 naps to 3.  Because of my wonkey work schedule, she occasionally still took a 4th late nap, but that's because my mom does not think that she'll make it to my return home from work.

This morning, I had the hardest time getting Lily to nap again.  She showed me the cranky signs after breakfast.  But, she wouldn't nap.  Forty minutes after first starting to get her to sleep, she's still fighting me.  So, I stop.  It was obviously not working.  I realized that she had taken 40 minutes to get to nap yesterday morning.  And, that Tuesday she didn't nap at all.  Now, she's in the middle of a wonder week and teething, so I had been attributing it to that.  But, we realized that she's trying to drop a nap.  That's why it's so hard to get her to sleep when she usually sleeps.  I thought I was seeing tired signs, but her cues won't even out until she's fully transitioned to two naps.  She was just a little fussy after breakfast.  I did think it was odd that she wasn't rubbing her eyes or pulling on her ears. Mystery solved.

If this is the new nap schedule, I will skip the gym and everything else I have on the calendar before work until she goes down to one nap.  This was divine.  She finally fell asleep near 10:00am.  She loves the new fan Daddy got her for her room.  She cannot stay awake while trying to figure it out.  It's too cute.  I knew I had to leave for work soon, so I scoop her up and lay in bed with her.  I fell asleep for about 15 minutes.  I love cuddling with her in bed, especially now that the mattress topper is so comfortable and I have no hip pain.  I got to sneak away, and I hoped that she would sleep awhile longer.  She wound up sleeping for more than 2.5 hours! 

Baby girl is getting older.  :)