Where there's smoke...
Helpful tip of the day: when you have a smoke detector, don't let the batteries run low.
posted by Melissa @ 5:51 PM
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5 Comments:
At 8:34 PM,
Melissa said…
Melissa, reading your post i felt (very) jealous that your baby sleeps in a crib in another room. nile is still sleeping in bed with us...i love the closeness, but at 9 months its getting a little old. i feel like i've missed the boat for making a good transition of getting him into a crib. as far as he's concerned our bed is his bed..i live for the mornings when it's my husband's turn to get up early with him & i have an hour or so of solo sleep where i can stretch out & roll over as i please...AAaahhh. yes, i realize that my comment has nothing to do with smoke alarms..
At 9:05 PM,
Tammy said…
You're a better person than I am, Melissa. I would've skipped the try-to-fix-it-myself stage and woken up my husband. If your husband still has hard feelings about the whole thing, tell him there are much worse wives out there. Heh.
Melissa O, I'm in the same boat. Most of the time I love having Sam in bed with us, but then there are other times...
At 8:05 AM,
Melissa said…
Melissa, I bet it's not too late! A slept in the bed with us until 4-5 months, when she started sleeping very poorly and waking up every hour. Getting her in the crib wasn't easy, but it has VASTLY improved my quality of life. I was going crazy being attached to her 24 hours a day. Also, she sleeps better and so do I.
Doppelganger: He got over it, but I might tell him anyway, for future reference.
At 12:25 PM,
Melissa said…
Melissa - how did you go about transitioning A into a crib? does she still wake up in the night? why do you think it is that she sleeps better now? i was always worried that when i put him in a crib i'd have to be in & out of bed all night to nurse & settle him down when he wakes..
At 3:38 PM,
Melissa said…
Let's see...I'll take these in order. This might be a long one.
Transitioning to crib: My original intent was to get her to nap in the crib--I wasn't even planning on worrying about night sleep yet. The first thing I did was to buy this book called "The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems." I don't agree with many of the BW's philosophies, but I had no idea even where to begin, and the book was helpful in telling me how to set up bedtime routines and in its description of certain methods to get babies to sleep without letting them cry it out. So the routines I set up were that every naptime, I swaddled her, used a white noise machine, and played a lullaby CD. To actually get her to sleep, I used a combination of methods. One of them was the pick up/put down method, where you put the baby in the crib and if she cries, you pick her up and hold her until she stops, at which point you put her down. Repeat as necessary, even if you have to do this 100 times. The PU/PD thing sometimes riled her up, so at those times I would rock her in my arms until she was mostly asleep, then put her down. If she was still wiggly, I would pat her stomach or back until she fell asleep, then wait until she was solidly asleep before I left the room. Over time, I was able to stop the PU/PD and rocking and just put her in the crib and pat her to sleep, and then eventually I could just put her in the crib awake and she would go to sleep on her own.
I put her in the crib at night on a whim. I thought she'd wake up in a couple of hours and then I'd take her to bed for the rest of the night. That night she slept for 7 hours straight, the longest stretch she had slept in her life. So that was how I knew she slept better in the crib--because she was sleeping for longer than she ever did while we were cosleeping.
For a month or two after we put her in the crib, she was still waking at night, but it was usually only once and fairly late, like 3 or 4 in the morning. So I did have to get up, but I was getting a more solid chunk of sleep than I had been, so it seemed worth it. On the few nights when she was waking constantly, usually I would just bring her to bed with me for the rest of the night. These days she mostly sleeps through.
All babies are different, so I don't know how much of this will work for you. I just know that I kept expecting her to magically learn how to sleep, and it turned out that we just had to show her how to do it. Nowadays she's a really good sleeper, which I never ever thought I'd say.
I hope some of this novel helps!
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