Archive for the ‘Baby Sleep Support’ Category

Today’s article is a guest article from the BabySignLanguage.com website. I taught both my boys baby sign language and LOVED it! And, so did they. Who knew that my son would have wanted to do art every day after breakfast when he was one year old if he couldn’t tell me? It was a wonderful gift for both of us to reduce frustration and communicate more than I imagined I could with a one year old. I highly recommend teaching baby sign language to your little one.

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Baby Sign Language is a popular and effective communication tool for parents and babies, reducing frustration and helping with the bonding process. One surprising effect of baby signing is that it can also help your baby to sleep. Parents who sign with their babies often report that bedtimes are less stressful, and babies or toddlers actually tell them when they’re tired! So how exactly does baby sign language help?

 

Baby Signing As Part Of A Bedtime Routine

Many parents know the importance of a bedtime routine. A bath, followed by milk and cuddles, then a story, is the foundation of a good night’s sleep. Learning the signs for Bath and Milk are fun ways for baby to communicate with you at this important time of the day. When Mom signs that it’s bath time, your baby will understand what is to come, and feel more secure and confident. Babies love to know what’s happening – and their confidence increases every time they correctly predict what will happen next.

Baby Signing Reduces Frustration

Tiredness and frustration are a major cause of a baby not sleeping well. Baby sign language is proven to reduce frustration in babies and toddlers. As their understanding grows, their ability to communicate also grows, along with their confidence. A happy, contented baby goes to sleep more easily than an anxious, frustrated one.

The Tiredness Trick

When a baby is still young, she will need at least one nap a day, as well as around 11-12 hours sleep a night. Some babies are masters at hiding the fact that they are tired! Watching for and learning your baby’s drowsy signals will help you to know when it’s time for a nap or bed. As part of everyday signing, babies learn signs for Tired and Sleep. With repetition and regular practice, your baby will learn to recognize when she is tired. This prevents over-tiredness, a common cause of disrupted sleep.

Baby Sign Language at Bedtime and Practicing

It’s a good idea to practice the bedtime routine through play. Making the signs for Tired and Sleep, show your little one that Teddy is tired and wants to sleep now. Put him to bed and read him a story. Leave the room for a moment then go back in to wake him up. Repeating this play will teach your baby that Mommy or Daddy will always come back when sleeping time is over.

Bonding With Baby Sign Language

Signing with your baby creates, over time, a fantastically strong bond. Sleeping alone (nighttime separation) is not as stressful for babies who are securely attached. Signing gives lots of opportunities for positive attention throughout the day, reducing the need for babies and toddlers to ‘play up’ at nap times. Parents are more confident about understanding their baby, so aren’t as anxious if there is a little ‘tired’ crying when baby’s in bed.

Baby Signs To Help With Your Baby’s Sleep

To sign Tired, extend your fingers and hold them together. Start with your fingers touching your chest, with your elbows up. Drop your elbows down. It is as if you are so tired you cannot keep holding your arms up.

To sign Sleep, start with fingers extended and spread apart. Beginning with your hand over your face, move your fingers down to end with your hand below your chin and your fingers touching your thumb. To add to the sleepy effect, as you make the sign feel your face relax and your eyes get droopy.

The milk sign is a lot like milking a cow (or goat), but without the vertical motion – you are just squeezing the udder. You take both hands, make them into a fist, relax, and repeat. You will notice most babies have trouble moving all fingers together at uniform speeds, but any kind of repeated squeezing and relaxing of the hand is likely milk.

To sign Bath, make a fist out of your two hands, then move the fists vertically up and down your chest. The sign looks a lot like someone scrubbing themselves with both hands.

Be sure to check out the Baby Sign Language website for any questions you have in helping your baby with their daily routine through signing. This a free resource to all the mother’s and father’s out there who want to start signing with their baby.

It’s so easy to get stuck in a rut. It’s so easy to let fear of the unknown of what the next step will look like that keeps us doing what we do every day, even if it means sleeping in 2-hour fragments. After all, sometimes working on your baby’s sleep is like blindfolding yourself and walking down 50 stories of steps.

When big changes in our house happen, I can bank on my sons’ sleep being affected. I could probably go to Vegas and, if they’d give me odds, I could win some money, even. When my son was a baby, a routine change would set us back a week, MINIMUM.

This week a big change in our life is happening. The boys had a nanny and now it’s time to move onto school. It is a big transition, especially for my youngest. It was not a decision taken lightly and I knew there would be adjustments…for all of us. We will miss her dearly and hope she finds another family quickly. God bless her that she’s helping us transition the boys slowly, so we can ease them in. If anyone needs a nanny, I’d gladly refer her.

On top of this big change, *I* need a change. I sit at my computer no less than 10-12 hours a day. I don’t get enough exercise and my once ultra-healthy diet has turned into semi-healthy, sometimes. I don’t weigh too much more than pre-kids, but it’s what’s IN my body I don’t like. I need exercise, but where to find the time?

So, I made this nifty, nerdy calendar using Google Calendar that makes it easy for me to see a whole week at-a-glance and color-code it into family, work, “me” time, exercise, cleaning, etc. Yes, it’s a little crazy, but I’m visual and needed to “see” where I could fit in the time. My husband laughed at me, but hey, I need to do what I need to do, right? Know what time I found to exercise? 5:30-6 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday plus a class I’m taking with my friend on Sundays 2-3 p.m.

Last night, both boys woke up in the middle of the night, one with a nightmare (which isn’t too uncommon even on a normal day) and one, twice, just because. I KNEW it would come this week. After all, I logged my sons’ sleep for months. I know them. And if you think getting up with one is hard, it is. Getting up with two is downright brutal! But, being the great mom that I am, I cuddled each of them knowing a) that this is a phase, a big transition going to school (yesterday was their first day) and b) I have learned well how to avoid making this into a long-term habit (since I’ve been through these things so many times now): Be loving and encouraging, but draw the line somewhere. Oh, and try not to co-sleep, unless I want to do it every night.

When my alarm went off at 5:25 a.m., I hit snooze. Then, I opened my eyes. I got up. I tried to talk myself OUT of exercising. I put on my exercise clothes and told myself “Just do 10 minutes.”

I walk down the stairs and I hear chirping. Are those the baby birds we’ve been watching for the last couple of weeks outside our bathroom window? Today was the first day I heard them chirp (they just opened their eyes a day or two ago). I peek out and I see the mommy bird feeding them worms and the whole family looked so happy. It melted my heart. If mommy bird can fly around at the crack of dawn to find worms for her babies, then I can exercise! And, just like that I did 20 minutes on the treadmill, thought of this article and typed it up, all before 6:30 a.m.

So, this message is for you to go out and find YOUR motivation today to tackle your baby’s sleep (or make any change in your life you’ve been putting off). It might not be the 12 hours a night you’re looking for, but start with 10 minutes. You might surprise yourself and get the 12 hours anyway.

What’s YOUR motivation to tackle on your baby’s sleep?

A common theme when I read the first e-mail in a one-on-one consultation or when I first talk on the phone with a new client is that the parent feels somehow responsible for the fact their baby won’t sleep and the sleep trouble they’re in. Either they were first time parents and didn’t know what they were or weren’t “supposed” to do or they knew they weren’t supposed to do it, but didn’t know what else to do. The bottom line is their baby won’t sleep and they feel it’s their fault.

This is also a common theme in many of the sleep books out there, too. Many of them make you feel guilty for nursing your baby all the way to sleep or using a pacifier or co-sleeping or not co-sleeping. If you don’t do it their way, you are not a good parent or you have failed your baby.

I’m here to say that it IS your fault your baby won’t sleep. Here’s why:

When your baby was 3 days old, your baby won’t sleep any way but breastfeeding or with the bottle. You fed him to sleep every nap and night after that until you thought he’d outgrow it.

When your baby was a few weeks old, you decided to try a pacifier and that worked quite well, too, only now your baby won’t sleep without it and you might be running in every two hours to replace it. You started to wonder whether you should be feeding baby on a schedule or feeding her on demand.

When your baby was a couple of months old, sleep was fine, so you felt like super mom (or dad). Or, sleep wasn’t great, but you made do. Some of your friends might have started claiming their babies were sleeping through the night and you wondered when yours would too. You wonder why your baby won’t sleep through the night, too.

When your baby turned 4 months old, for many, sleep started to go downhill and you didn’t have the foggiest reason why. If you were lucky, you were starting to wonder what it would be like to sleep for more than 6 or 8 hours in a row again. If you were unlucky, 3 hours straight sounded pretty good. If your baby won’t sleep longer than one or two hours, you might have trouble functioning in the daytime.

When your baby was 6 months old, you might have started dreaming about what it would be like to be able to plan activities in the day. You might have dreamt about a baby’s schedule that was almost the same every day or you enjoyed going with the flow, throwing a strict schedule to the wind. You might have started to wonder if your baby’s naps would start to lengthen like other babies you heard about. Some days it feels like your baby won’t nap and won’t sleep through the night.

When your baby was 9 months old, you wondered if your baby still needed night feedings or not because your baby won’t sleep all night like your friend’s babies.

When your baby is now a toddler and hasn’t outgrown the sleep challenges you thought she would, you start to wonder if it is your fault. You realize you’ve helped some habits to remain habits, but haven’t been able to break them, no matter how many things you’ve tried and now that it’s been so long, is it really fair to just let her cry it out?

You see, all of these things are your fault. You became a loving mom who decided to breastfeed to sleep when your baby wouldn’t sleep any other way. You were a loving dad when you rocked your baby to sleep every night when she cried bloody murder any time you stopped. You replaced that pacifier ten times per night, so your baby could get the 12 hours of sleep you heard he needed every night. You sacrificed your sleep to help your baby get hers. That doesn’t make you a bad parent, that makes you a loving parent!

My advice today is to embrace the fact that it IS your fault! You are a loving parent. You did what you had to do to transition to parenthood or to tend to your older children when your baby won’t sleep no matter what you do. This is NOT a bad thing. We all do what it takes when we can barely see straight, trying to figure out how to even be a new mom or dad. We don’t want our babies to cry (or scream as some of us would have it) and we do what we can to make sure we have babies who will become well-adjusted young adults one day. We are afraid we will make a million mistakes (and we will), but there is no way to predict whether you will have a baby who will miraculously sleep all night at 8 weeks or will be rocked to sleep for 5 minutes every single night and sleep 12 hours straight. Did I know I’d end up rocking my son for 2-3 hours every night at bedtime and repeat it every 2 hours later (or nurse him to sleep)? Nope. I did what I felt was right and I don’t regret it for a second.

Nothing is a problem until it is a problem and only THEN do you need to decide to make a change. Only YOU know when that time is and when you have a problem. No one else in your life knows what you are going through every day, but you and your baby. You will know when it’s time.

So, from now on, when you start an e-mail to me or start a phone conversation, instead of saying something like you’ve failed as a mom or that you made a lot of mistakes, say something like this:

“Damn right I rocked and held my baby to sleep every night and I enjoyed the cuddle time! But, now it’s time to make a change.”

How is it your fault your baby won’t sleep (or wouldn’t sleep)?

A parent recently mentioned to me something about her mom making her feel guilty about the things she was doing to help her baby sleep and I thought this would be a good article topic to write about.

There are co-sleeping parents whose loved ones believe in cry-it-out and don’t understand why they wouldn’t let their baby cry-it-out. Then there are parents who do cry-it-out whose loved ones don’t understand how they could let their baby cry. And, of course, there is everything in between.

I am an optimist (at least I think I am) and try to find the good in people, so I remind myself that people are only trying to help and honestly feel they are giving their best advice. Those without kids that give advice, I definitely take their advice with a grain of salt. I mean I know *I* had all the answers before I had kids. It seemed so simple didn’t it? Little did I know what a loop motherhood would put me in! I guess I didn’t have as many answers as I thought, so now I don’t expect non-parents to have as many, either.

When I would mention to people what a challenging sleeper my son was I got ALL kinds of advice! From a lady (a stranger!) on an airplane asking me if my baby needed a bottle when my son was overtired and needed a nap and I was frantically trying to “hard rock” him (as we called it) into a slumber to my mother-in-law telling me to keep him up late so he’d sleep better, anybody and everybody thought they knew how to help my son sleep:

“You need to make more noise when he sleeps” – He can’t sleep through noise!

“Don’t let him nap” – Less naps meant more over-tiredness which meant more night-wakings!

“Keep him up late” – See above

“Give him a pacifier” – Yeah because I didn’t try that when he was up every hour last night. Thanks.

“Breastfeeding is not enough” – Yes it is! He’s not hungry. He’s tired. (I went on to breastfeed both sons for a year and didn’t start solids until close to 6 months)

“Put cereal in his bottle” – No solids until 6 months old, thank you, and it can be a choking hazard*. And, see above, he was not hungry.

“When my baby was 6 weeks, I just put her to bed and didn’t get up again until morning. (even if crying)” – No thank you. Not for me.

“Does he have to go to sleep now?” (when people wanted to visit) – Yes. Yes he does, because the ramifications of not getting him to bed now is not pretty.

The advice was endless and much of it might work for other people, but just not for me. The beautiful part is that these are my children and I’m the one who gets to decide what’s best for them. Well, okay, my husband does have a say, too. So, I nodded my head or said we tried it and, okay, in some cases e-mailed all the benefits of breastfeeding to educate my mother-in-law people (by the way, I am pro-breastfeeding but not a breastfeeding nazi and feel formula feeding moms are just as loving and their babies will be just as smart as mine).

When you’re struggling with your baby or toddler’s sleep and everyone around you either has “the answer” or the baby or toddler who is that perfect sleeper, it’s easy to lose confidence and wonder if you’re doing everything wrong. You might question your ability to parent. But, what I tell my clients a lot is that sometimes you do EVERYTHING right and your baby just. won’t. sleep. You can only do so much. You can lead a horse to water, but can’t make him drink is how the saying goes and it is so true when it comes to your baby’s sleep.

Your job is to provide the soothing sleep environment and to give the opportunity for sleep and the rest is up to them (unfortunately in many of our cases!). When my son, now older, tells me at bedtime “I’m not tired” (when he says that every night and I know is not true and just that he doesn’t want the day to end), it is my job to set firm limits that lights are out at 8:30, no matter what. Most of the time he is asleep in a few minutes and other nights he might take 10-15 while he listens to a CD playing. Either way, I’ve done my job. And, when he was a baby, my job was to make sure we stuck to routine pretty regularly because of his temperament and get him the sleep he needed because of the ramifications if we didn’t. Sure, family members didn’t understand why we had to skip the barbecue for his nap (among many other things), but his sleep and well being came first and we knew him best. AND, we were the ones who had to get up at 10pm, 1am, 3am, etc. when he wasn’t sleeping from being overtired. They weren’t going to do it! There are many things to help promote sleep, of course, and that’s what this site is all about, but at some point you do have to let go and realize they are just going to do what they are going to do and they will have good days and bad days just like we do.

All in all, YOU KNOW YOUR BABY BEST! You are the one with them day in and day out (even working parents like me!). And, you know what you can handle as a parent. We knew the result if we kept our son out too late, so we chose our special events very very carefully. They would always set us back at least a week. Our second son has been much more go-with-the-flow, so I can definitely see how people do it. It just wasn’t going to happen with our first son and it’s not because he was first. It’s just his personality, temperament, and sleep needs. It’s just how the cookie crumbles.

How do you handle the guilt?

* Note: Some pediatricians will recommend some cereal in a bottle for severe cases of acid reflux, but please check with your pediatrician.