We received a book as a shower gift called Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. A good friend of ours also confirmed that this was very useful when their daughter was young.
I finally cracked it open a couple of days ago when Conrad started something new: not sleeping. To be truthful, he was sleeping well at night – waking a couple of times to eat, but mainly sleeping from about 9pm to 7 or 8am. But he decided that daytime sleeping was for the birds. Or in our case, the cats.
The book says that babies of his age should never have more than 2 hours of wakefulness. Doing the math, this means once he wakes up and I feed him, he’s got about another hour before he’s supposed to be sleeping again. I tried swaddling, rocking, walking, jiggling, shushing and endlessly repeating, “Go to sleep. Go to sleep.” to no avail.
On Wednesday, he napped in the morning for 2 hours but then was awake from noon to 7pm, at which time he was down for the night. On Thursday, he was up from 7am until 6pm, with a few short catnaps in between. My nerves were a little frazzled.
Today, we have a new approach. Instead of picking him up and rocking him back to sleep when he wakes up 5 minutes after the previous attempt, I left him in his crib. He doesn’t cry, he just sort of flails about, breaking the swaddle and looking like he’s surely wide awake. This has been going on for an hour and a half. And miraculously, he’s actually falling asleep for long periods of time between flails.
Maybe he’s just trying to convey that he no longer enjoys the swaddle.