Hmm, I thought I'd published this post, but obviously not! Suffice it to say, Owen is now sleeping really well, thanks to a little bit of fussing it out. Two nights of letting him fuss when he woke (unless it was time to eat) and he got it all figured out. The longest he ever fussed for was 20 minutes, and it was actually not that bad, because he never got to the screaming stage that he would escalate to the times Steve or I would go in and then try to settle him. But I'm posting this anyway, because wow, I need to remember this to hold over his head one day!
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I am so beyond tired these days, I'm like the walking dead. Auntie Erica says I'm a "mombie", which fits just perfectly. Owen is not sleeping well. He falls asleep pretty well; he needs some intervention to get him down for naps, but he goes down fairly easily at night. But he does not stay asleep. Some nights, it's like he's awake every hour. I take 10 minutes or so to settle him back down (he still only wants to eat once in the night, the other times, he just needs a cuddle) and then he's back into a deep sleep. Which only lasts for another little bit of time!
The books I've been reading say that babies have a sleep cycle of about 40 minutes, where they start out sleeping lightly, then deeper, and then lightly again. It seems like every sleep cycle, Owen wakes up. I definitely think it's a sleep cycle thing, because even when he sleeps a little longer, it's increments of 45 minutes or so - he'll sleep for an hour and a half, and (rarely!) for three hours at a stretch.
This is very hard, not only because I'm not getting quality sleep, but because Owen slept so WELL when he was tiny - I feel like I must have done something to screw him up! Of course, between teeth pain, learning to sit up, rolling over, he's got a lot on the go right now, and that's enough to keep anyone awake at night.
The interrupted sleep doesn't seem to bother Owen at all - he often wakes up in the morning and just talks happily to himself until we go in to get him. He's in a good mood during the day between naps. He's still our Cheeri-O, which is great. And at least I get all those smiles and love from him when he's awake - it would be much harder to be a mombie during those first few weeks, before you get all those gummy grins and love back from the baby.
One of the strategies suggested by the (massive amounts!) of reading I've been doing on baby sleep suggests that if he's waking in a set pattern, to set an alarm, and go in and try to semi-rouse them before they would normally wake themselves, to break their pattern. I spent two awful nights doing just that (from the spare bedroom, poor Papa did not need to be woken up all night long!) but it seemed to cause more issues. To start, because Owen sometimes wakes up every 45 minutes, I was setting my alarm for only 1/2 hour, which was really tough on me. And then, because he sometimes sleeps for an hour and a half at a time before waking, I couldn't tell if he stayed asleep "longer" because I jiggled him around a little bit, or because he would have stayed asleep then anyway. And several times, I just woke him up by accident, and he was even MORE upset than when he wakes himself up. So, was I really doing anything, or would he have slept through those times and then woken up those other times anyway? I decided that I wasn't doing anything, and since I was a much better mommy for getting my sleep in 1.5 hour chunks than 1/2 hour chunks, I've just gone back to letting him wake me!
Today is Steve's last day of school before Christmas holidays, so soon I'll have some middle-of-the-night help, since he won't need to be up for work, which is nice. Things can't go on like they are, the walking dead is not an attractive look for Owen's first Christmas!
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