Turning Over a New Leaf
That’s Josie showing off her new rolling over talents. She’s so proud of herself when she makes it over all by herself! She’s no pro quite yet, but she does occasionally manage to roll in either direction (back to tummy, or tummy to back). She’s an active baby, that’s for sure!
Unfortunately, she’s become restless during the night, too. It used to be that she would wake up a few times to nurse, but then fall right back asleep with little effort. Lately, she’s waking up more often than ever and really resists being put back down to sleep again after nursing. So… we’re embarking on a 10-day experiment to see if we can help everyone get better nighttime sleep by following some advice from Elizabeth Pantley’s book The No-Cry Sleep Solution.
I’ve browsed through several sleep books from the library including The Happiest Baby on the Block, The Baby Whisperer, Dr. Sears’ Sleep Book, and others. There are parts of each of them that seem like they would be helpful, but Pantley’s approach is where we’re going to start. I’m not really looking for lots of advice at this point, but I would like to hold myself accountable to check in after ten days of honest effort and see if we have any improvement.
Last night, she slept for 2-3 hours at a time, which is pretty good — but it took a whole lot of coaxing to get her back to sleep in her own bed each time. For starters, I’m working on lessening her need to suck in order to sleep and working on transitioning her into her own bed without waking up. Once she starts doing better with that, then we’ll move on to helping her fall asleep in her bed. The book gives a bunch of suggestions for gently weaning the baby from being as dependent on mom or dad to fall asleep and stay asleep.
It feels good to have some sort of plan, and ten days seems like a reasonable amount of time for a trial. I’m glad to be doing this now before the holidays are in full swing and before teething kicks in. Wish us luck!