La la la la

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a week or so now.

The sleeping front with Abigail has been quite the roller coaster lately.

We’re over the swaddle now – or think we are. It seems having her hands free helps her to self sooth better and get back to sleep on her own. At least it did.

The biggest problem lately is getting to sleep. We were managing a 7:30 to 8:30 bedtime for some time, with forays into the 6 o’clock hour, but not in  a while. Recently she’s slipped back to 9:30 or even after 11 as last night went.

And don’t think this is all without some set bedtime routine. We’re still doing the routine. It’s still set for 7:30, but most nights she’s impervious.

Of course it’s not just the bedtime that’s difficult, keeping her asleep is no fun either. For a while she was waking every two and half hours (swaddled or not), then dropped to every hour and a half. At that point we decided to try having her sleep with us. It worked great for my sister and everyone else we talked to, so why not.

We started with Jen and the baby in our bed to get used to things. I slept downstairs. After a week, I moved back to our bed. It was definitely less sleep for me, but seemingly a little more sleep for Jen. We’d start Abigail out in her room, then on the first waking after midnight move her to our bed. We did that for about a week, then all of a sudden Abigail ended up sleeping four or five hour stretches on her own in her own room.

Awesome!

But short lived.

We went right back to late bedtime and waking up frequently.

Last night was no different. As Jen was getting ready to finally put Abigail down (or at least try, again), she asked what I thought would work best – nurse her in her room, bounce, then try to put her down, or nurse her in our room, in our bed and everyone just fall asleep together.

I opted for the latter. More often than not, I’ve been called in to do the “put down” (bounce for 10 minutes or more with repeated attempts of putting her down until it works). Last night I was too tired for all that.

We all climbed into bed, turned out the light and Jen went to nursing. I guess it was twenty minutes later when the “La la las” started. Abigail had finished, rolled off wide awake and started talking to herself.

“La la la la laa laa la laa”
Then.
“Ra ra ra ra raa ra raa ra”

At first it was cute. It was real cute. With a big old smile on my face I started to drift off.

“La lala la la la laa la laa la”

Continued, until I knew it wouldn’t stop (at least not in a timely fashion). I picked her up and took her to her room where I commenced the bouncing. A few short minutes and she was out. In my mind the “la las” were basically her way of saying, “not sure what to do here folks. Can someone help me out?”, so I did and she went to sleep.

Thirty minutes later she was up again.

And so it goes.

Tonight it’s sleep training (i.e. “cry it out”).

We’ll see. We tried once before, but didn’t really commit to it (i.e. repeat it the next night.).

– b