Pillow Talk

Quilla becomes more delightful with every day.  I can’t believe how fast she is growing!  Now that she is 7 weeks old, she sleeps and eats more regularly, and she is full of smiles for me all the time. 

When she was about 3 weeks old, I had feared she may be a colicky baby.  She was fussy in general most of the time and then from approximately 5pm to 8pm she was nearly inconsolable.  She hardly slept and wanted to eat almost every hour.  Then she would eat too much and would have terrible gas & hiccups, and I would spend hours wearing a path in the floor of my hallway as I bounced & burped her over and over.  What happened to the 3 to 4 hour sleep cycles and then nursing I heard/read about??? I was totally stressed, sleep deprived, and I thought my nipples were literally going to fall off.  I hated that she was always upset and/or in pain, and I felt like a total failure as a mother. 

My husband would be the first to tell you that when I am tired, I can be very cranky.

It finally dawned on me: “if I am sleep deprived, she must be too.”  A friend of mine had given me a book called “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child” by Marc Weissbluth M.D.  I started to tear through it searching for answers … and got them. 

It turns out that I was unintentionally sleep depriving my baby.  Every time she would “seem” to be waking up (day or night) I would pick her up.  I didn’t realize that if I waited 5 seconds longer, she would doze back off into a deep sleep.  Babies apparently have very short REM sleep cycles, and I was waking her prematurely.

This is what I discovered:  She was cranky because she was tired, so she would cry. Crying would cause her to swallow air, which would cause her to get gas which would make her cry some more. Then she wanted to nurse (too much) to sooth herself which would give her more of a tummy ache, and then she would be so upset that she couldn’t fall asleep….. and the vicious cycle would go on. 

Quilla wasn’t colicky. She was tired! It totally made sense! 

I started making a very conscience effort to make sure she napped more during the day, and that my husband and I didn’t pick her up until she was TOTALLY awake. 

Quilla is a completely different baby now.  She sleeps and eats in 3 – 5 hour cycles at night and takes nice 2 – 3 hour naps during the day.  She has pretty much stopped cluster feeding in the afternoons and early evenings now, and she is rarely fussy.  When she is awake, she is usually full of smiles, and we have such a great time together!

I guess the old wives tale is true: NEVER wake a sleeping baby.