The Sleep Riddle.

Which came first--the chicken or the egg? The Nap Nanny or the baby who refuses to sleep laying flat? The swing or a baby who must be rocked to sleep?

Jason and I are gradually transitioning Adelyn out of her swing for naps and out of her Nap Nanny at bedtime. The goal is for Adelyn to be able to continue her normal day anywhere we go--in a hotel, at a babysitter's, at her grandparents'. To be able to fall asleep on her own, on a bed, in a pack n' play, on a blanket on the floor. Because the way it is right now--at least in our house, her grandparents have had more luck getting her to nap without the swing--Adelyn has a very particular way she likes to fall asleep. And it includes vigorous rocking during the day, and a bottle at night (and throughout the night, whenever she wakes up).

When I look back on our first days as parents I realize just how good those marketers are at their jobs. You know how the older generation is always marveling at how many things you need to have a baby these days? Mechanical aquariums in cribs, swings so big they look like a piece of furniture, computer devices that track the amount of times your baby wakes during the night and how long they cry each time. We only need these things because we buy these things. And trust me, I'm not making some grand proclamations of freeing myself from the baby-mania consumerism. I am a victim and I will continue to be a victim. Because it makes me happy to buy things that will make our lives with Addy easier or that look cute in her room.

If we'd never put her in the swing she never would have grown accustomed to it. If we'd never put her in the Nap Nanny because she fussed whenever she was flat on her back (I think she did have reflux in the beginning, but not anymore), she'd be a pro at sleeping on her back.

But now Addy's life is a riddle of gadgets that she both depends on and loves. She falls asleep instantly in her swing--because she knows it means nap time. She falls asleep easily at night while we feed her the last bottle--because she knows eating in her Nap Nanny means it's time to go to sleep. And when she wakes up throughout the night, as all babies do, she cries out for another bottle--because that's how she knows to fall asleep.

After five months Jason and I are beginning to work our way out of these dependencies. The first step was to put Adelyn's swing in her nursery so that she's not stirred when someone knocks on the door or Louie barks (why it took me five months to figure that one out, I'm not sure). This morning I successfully got Adelyn to fall asleep in her Nap Nanny for her first nap of the day, and she did it without a bottle and only a few minutes of fussing. It's been thirty minutes and there hasn't been a peep over the monitor.

Next, we'll retire the Nap Nanny to the attic, to be used as a lounger for her as a toddler or on our next child, or to give to a friend who's baby doesn't like sleeping on his or her back (thereby passing on the vicious cycle to someone else).

This weekend Addy stayed with her Janu and Pops and I asked them if they'd mind trying to get her to fall asleep flat on her back. I've seen them do this before, and they have a knack for it that I don't. The next morning we got the report--she slept soundly like that until one in the morning, then woke up and wanted to do nothing but play and stare at the full moon (of course, her Janu obliged. How could you not? It's nearly impossible to leave Addy to sleep when she's lying in her crib, arms and legs kicking wildly, squealing and giggling for you to pick her up). After that they put her in the Nap Nanny, because this is a guaranteed way to get her to sleep.

It all sounds so complicated and I realize that, at the heart of it, it's really not. Babies will sleep, eventually, when they need to. On your shoulder, on your bed, in your lap, in a swing, or flat on their back in a crib--the "proper" way. We--or, more so, me--make it even more complicated.

And now it's up to me to find our way out of the obstacle course that is falling asleep.

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Four Month Sleep Regression

It's been a few days since I've written, and I wish I had an exciting excuse as to why.

Really, it's just that I am so tired.

I've never been much of a sleeper. I don't sleep in; I secretly (or not so secretly, I guess) don't understand the appeal of snoozing the day away. At sleepovers growing up I was always the first one awake, laying there, bored, antsy, staring at the ceiling, waiting for my friends to get up.

Jason, on the other hand, needs his sleep. He'll sleep until late into the afternoon if he can. But if I have absolutely nothing on the agenda, even pre-Adelyn, I can't turn my mind off once it snaps awake at seven.

I don't think I realized just how crucial that sleep is, though. Until it's taken away from me. During the beginning of our parenting life I don't think I was sleeping more than thirty minutes at a time, but I was so wrapped up in the newness of everything I didn't let it get to me. I hardly remember it now. It's just a blur of shuuusssshhhing, rocking, swaddling and breast-feeding all hours of the night.

But then, like magic, Adelyn started sleeping with the same ease as her dad. The amazing pattern started when she was around one and a half months old. She'd go to bed at 7:30 or 8 and sleep solidly until 6:30, sometimes 7:30, a few times even until 8. And that lasted until, oh, last weekend.

Now, it's taking an hour or more to get her to fall asleep. The minute Jason and I shut her door she starts crying again, and I go immediately back in and try to comfort her. When that doesn't work I pick her up, and she immediately belches like a frat boy who overdosed on foamy keg beer. I don't know where this sudden, intense gas is coming from. Nothing else in her life has changed.

After several rounds of that, she'll finally pass out for good. And then she'll sleep until three a.m., sometimes four, usually five. It's gone from 8-7 to 10-3.

For the record, I'm not going to let her cry it out. I've let her cry--more like fuss--for a few minutes before, and it always leads to a choking, gag, GET-ME-THE-HELL-OUT-OF-HERE-sort of melt-down. For her and for me. And I don't understand how letting them cry it out will ever solve whatever's ailing them. It seems to me that it would just teach them that no one, not mommy or daddy, is coming to get them. And that thought breaks my still-hormonal heart.

And the thing is, since her nighttime sleep has gone AWOL, her daytime pattern has become infinitely better. There's very little crying during the day now. Just a lot of babbling and giggling and napping.

Jason is in Memphis for his bachelor party this weekend, so I'm going it alone. And I'm tired. It's six in the morning and Adelyn is finally back asleep (in her swing), and I'm sitting in the recliner, tired and defeated. There's no point in catching a few more zzzz's now.

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The Tongue-out, Toothless, Best Thing Ever.

I try almost daily to catch a picture or video of Adelyn with her trademark, toothless, tongue-out grin. And it's almost impossible. She smiles the most when she's looking right at you, and the sight of your smile sends her into a squealing-tizzy that makes me forget about the fact I've already changed pajamas three times because she threw up on them.

Usually, when you break out the camera, she turns into this:

She just stares, fixates on the lens. She doesn't smile, or move. She's just mesmerized. Which is adorable, but slightly inconvenient for documenting your baby's milestones.

Maybe she's smiling so much this morning because she finally got back to her normal sleep schedule. Saturday night she stayed with my parents, and luckily for them I think they got to witness her in the peak of a growth spurt. She cried, and cried (they took her for two walks, the cure-all for her fussiness), and she woke up at four a.m. Sunday night, back at home, she did the same thing. Then Monday night, she was up at one a.m., then again at five, then again every ten minutes for the rest of the day.

I was beyond relieved when I woke up to her babbling over the monitor this morning and saw that it was six a.m., her usual wake-up time. For a minute there I was convinced her sleeping through the night was just a fluke, or that maybe I'd imagined it in an exhausted-stupor.

I love that smile. I'm not sure winning the lottery could give a mom the same thrill as feeling like your baby's happy.

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The Patience Game.

There's a key to this whole beginning part that I think I've been missing. Or at least lacking.

Patience.

I don't have a lot of it. I never have. I'm an instant gratification sort of girl.

The hardest parts of my parenting day come at the very beginning and the very end of the day, when my patience is at its thinnest. In between, there's very little crying or mommy breakdowns. I feed her when she's hungry, play with her when she's awake, change her when she's wet, and put her down when she's sleepy. It's really not much more complicated than that.

First thing in the morning, though, I'm usually half-asleep. And since I've been sleeping until I hear her crying to eat, she's already hungry. So I have to listen to her crying for a good five to ten minutes while I make a bottle, warm the bottle, change her diaper, and try to slap myself out of exhaustion. (I know, especially by now, that crying is all she can do. I still haven't gotten used to the sound, though. I'm still not inured to it. It still makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong. I thought that would've gone away by now.) By the time the bottle gets to her mouth she's frustrated and gulps it down. Which means she usually spits up midway through, and an hour later, once she's been fed and burped and calmed, I invariably have formula all over my shirt, my hair.

The hardest part is at night, right before bed. I always get nervous around eight, anticipating what this bedtime ritual will include. And the harder I try to figure out a solution, the more we struggle.

At night, I'm tired. I'm ready for a break. So I probably don't burp her long enough; I'm anxious to get her quiet and in the crib. And rushing makes it worse--if you put her down too soon, before all the air is out of her little, confused tummy or before she's had a chance to really get sleepy, she's crying again in five minutes. That's when Jason and I start to scramble, trying to figure out what's missing. Is she still hungry? Does she need to burp again? Are you going to go warm another bottle or should I? Can I go lie down? Are you sure you don't mind if I go lie down?

Every night, it's the same struggle.

On the nights that I go to bed early and Jason finishes the last feeding by himself, everything seems to run more smoothly. I've said it to Jason and to myself countless times but I feel like he's just so much more patient than me. He always take a lot longer at nighttime, feeding her, rocking her, comforting her. When we do it together, I get stressed because I'm tired. I try to follow a routine I've concocted in my head rather than what she's demanding because I'm so anxious for it to work.

I don't know how it is that you learn patience. I listen to Adelyn wailing for a bottle, and I want to teach her that the bottle is coming, to just hold on. But I'm smart enough to know that I'm the one that has to teach it to her--every survival mechanism she was born with is telling her to wail for that food and to wail louder the longer it takes to get there.

In most ways it's getting so much easier by the day, this whole parenting thing. As she stays awake longer during the day, though, there's more pressure to move beyond the eat, sleep, poop equation, to start teaching her things when her eyes are open. To establish rituals that let her know the bottle is coming, that it's time to play and time to sleep.

The more I try to follow advice (from my doctor, from stupid books and parents who have been there before), the more stressed I get. When Jason puts her to bed, he just does it.

I'm impatient. Anxious for the day I can rationalize with her, to tell her that a warm bottle takes just a little longer than a cold one.

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Forgiveness and Stuff.

Adelyn and I made it through our first fight, and we're now getting along perfectly. I forgave her for her non-stop screeching the night before, the screeching that had me pulling out my hair and pleading, and she forgave me for not being able to figure out what was wrong.

Jason and I had some trouble getting her to sleep last night, too. We started the bedtime ritual at nine, and at midnight we were taking turns trying to solve the puzzle and stop the cries. Once she fell asleep, though, she slept for six and a half hours.

I still can't figure it out. There's no rhyme or reason to her night time ritual yet; the same thing that works one night infuriates her the next.

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Night Terror.

I think I bragged a little too much about our incredible sleeping baby. Adelyn spent the last week sleeping in consistent six, sometimes seven and a half hour stretches, and I let this fact be known. To everyone. People who asked and people who could care less.

Sleeping through the night is like the newborn holy grail. There are those women, the ones on BabyCenter or whatever forum, who just casually say, "Oh, she's just such a good sleeper. It just happened naturally." And when you've been up since three in the morning and have formula powder all over your pajama pants--the same ones you've been wearing for three days straight--or two huge wet spots on your shirt where your milk is leaking and you forgot to put in new breast pads, you want to take those women by the shoulders and shake them until that smug grin or emoticon wipes off their faces. Maybe this is just the sleep deprivation talking. But that's what I want to do to myself, two days ago, back when I thought I just might've figured the nighttime riddle out early.

We put her in her nursery for the first time on Saturday. I didn't think I'd be ready to put her in her own room this soon, but I realized I was barely sleeping, even when I was, since I could hear every one of her little grunts and snores. And her nursery is just steps away from our bedroom.

The first night we had her home, and I was in the depths of a sleep deprivation I hope I'll never find myself in again, we laid her in the Pack 'N Play and nervously tried to shut our eyes. I really couldn't, though. I tried to sleep on the side facing away from her, because otherwise I would have just stared at this strange, unpredictable creature I'd created snoring next to me. So, instead, I asked Jason every ten minutes if she was okay. Rather than turning over and looking for myself. If I looked, I'd want to stand up, go over to her, put my finger under her nose to make sure she was really breathing. I tortured Jason for at least two hours, making him sit up to look. And then, finally, the sun was up and neither of us had slept.

Six weeks later I've gotten oh-so-much better at just letting go of watching over her.

The first night she slept in her crib was that magical night where she slept for seven and a half hours, and I naively thought I'd stumbled upon that parenting holy grail so many blindly grasp at for months, even years.

I don't know what I was like when I was Adelyn's age; I do know, however, that I struggled for way too long with a need to sleep with my parents. I had an insanely active imagination as a kid, one where vindictive skeletons were rattling around in my kitchen and that distant beeping noise from the leaving room was a bomb a team of Nazis had assembled. I spent years trying to sleep by myself without concocting these wild fantasies. My parents tried everything; they bribed me to sleep through the night on my own, rationalized with me, explained the unlikelihood of Nazis in Middle Tennessee. I don't even remember when it stopped. Actually, I don't know if it ever did. I've just learned to better ignore the fear and focus on sleep.

I don't want Adelyn to go through the same thing. Not that it's preventable. The only thing my parents ever did wrong was encourage me to read and imagine as much as possible. But now that I have a child of my own and I get to try to fix whatever was wrong with my own childhood in her, I want to start early.

So at six weeks, she was going to sleep in her crib like a big girl.

Last night. Oh, last night. Jason and I gave her a bath (which she loves). We sang to her. Read to her. Swaddled her. Fed her one last time. She fell asleep at 11. At 2:30, I heard her crying over the monitor. I woke up, warmed her bottle, fed her with all the lights off. She ate four ounces and then burped like a champ. And then proceeded to cry for four more hours.

Nothing was working.

It got to the point I had hoped, prayed, it would never get to. When absolutely nothing was calming her and the screeching was starting to ricochet through my brain like nails down a chalkboard. I put her back in her crib. Turned off the lights. Shut the door. I walked outside to my back porch for exactly five minutes. I hope this doesn't qualify as "crying it out"; that really wasn't my intention. I just needed a minute--or five--to quiet myself.

When I went back upstairs, she was fast asleep.

Two hours later, I heard the crying again. I had just fallen back to sleep myself. She was fed and burped, and has now been asleep for three and a half hours.

I need a nap.

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Victory chant.

Seven and a half hours. Seven and a half hours! I'm repeating it over and over in my head. It's my new victory chant. It's a chant that means things are starting to work. Things are starting to fall into place. Jason and I are starting to sink into our new lives, after five weeks of blindly wading through these new waters.

The type-A part of my brain took over yesterday morning. I decided to keep a chart for just a week of Adelyn's daily routine, hoping that it would clue me in to her schedule. Because I know one's in there somewhere, I just have a hard time remembering it day after day.

So I frantically tried to keep up with when she slept, ate and pooped. And yesterday, of course, Adelyn decided to sleep in one-hour intervals and only eat 2 ounces at a time. It took until 9 p.m. for me to say screw it and focus on playing with her rather than running back to the kitchen to mark intake on my fridge. But I think I'll leave the barely-completed schedule up there for a while, maybe to remind myself that she's only five weeks old and will do as she damned-well pleases. Or maybe I'll just take a permanent marker and write "Seven and a half hours!" over all of it.

If you've ever had a newborn in your house you know how triumphant this feels. Jason and I had mastered a pretty decent rhythm over the past five weeks, but it was one of survival, not life. I'd been heading to bed around 10, while Jason stayed up with Adelyn until one. He'd then feed her one last time and bring her upstairs to the Pack 'N Play in our room. (This way, I'd get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, or even just to myself.) Then I'd get up with Adelyn the next time she cried, usually around four or five in the morning, letting Jason sleep until 7 or 8 without interruption. While that was working, it also meant that Jason and I didn't get to actually go to bed together. And that's perfectly fine in the beginning, I think. As long as we were both functioning, breathing human beings with a newborn at home, we didn't have room to complain.

Last night, though, we took the plunge and disrupted the working schedule. We stayed up--together!--watched Lost--together!--gave Adelyn a bath and fed her one last time--together!--swaddled her and put her to sleep. This was at 11.

I woke up in a panic at 6:45 when I realized that Adelyn still hadn't cried. I jumped out of bed and ran to her bassinet, where she was just stirring from sleep, sucking on her fingers.

Seven and a half hours. Seven and a half!

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A One-Month Old's Itinerary.

I've come to understand that getting a one-month old on a schedule is a lot like trying to train Louie to talk. A fun idea, but next to impossible. Before Adelyn arrived I said funny things like, "I'll let her nap in her crib and sleep at night in the Pack 'N Play," and "We'll feed her every night at 10 and then read her a book before bed," or "I'll get work done while she sleeps."

Funny, funny things.

It turns out that Adelyn will sleep where she wants, when she wants. I can try to get work done while she sleeps, but as soon as her eyelids start to droop I'm confronted with a 10-page list of things I want to do--sleep? shower? write? read? clean?--and inevitably she'll wake up before I've barely had a chance to tackle the first task. I can bathe her 'til my fingers turn into raisins at night but it doesn't mean she'll sleep any better than if she was covered in her own filth.

(Keep in mind I'm talking about my daughter here, she who is perfectly content sitting in her own soiled diaper. I have to play the guessing game on the whole diaper-changing front.)

In another month or so I think I'll jump back on the schedule-train, mostly because I'm the sort of person that doesn't do so well without structure. I'd like to say I'm a free-spirit--it's certainly what I've always marketed myself as--but truthfully I'm happiest when I wake up at the same early time every morning, when I have certain landmarks throughout my day.

Adelyn's created her own sort-of schedule for the time being, and Jason and I have done a pretty good job, I think, at finding a compromise within it.

When Jason gets home from work, we eat dinner and spend a little while hanging out with each other while Adelyn naps. Sometimes we give her a bath (usually every two days or so) or we sing and play guitar for her. Then, around 10 or so, I go to sleep. Jason stays up with her until 1-ish (it's his only time throughout the day to really get one-on-one time with her), feeds her one more time, and then swaddles her and brings her up to our room, where she sleeps in a Pack 'N Play next to our bed. She--usually--will sleep until 5:30ish (today it was 6:30, but I don't want to jinx it), and I get up and feed her. Jason sleeps until 7:30 or 8 and goes to work. It's not perfect, but it's working. For now. I feel almost bad saying that we're both getting survivable rest with a newborn at home.

I thought it was supposed to be the night-time that made new parents want to rethink the whole procreating thing. Jason and I have found a pretty good rhythm, though, when the sun goes down. It's during the day that I feel so frazzled and constantly on-call.

The mornings are the only sort-of predictable thing. Adelyn's been staying awake for a good two or three hours after her first feeding, and this is the time I get the most interaction with her.

From this morning, for example:

And did you have any idea that when babies sneeze, you can actually hear a teeny, tiny, audible "achoo?" I can't get enough of her little achoos.

Adelyn had fallen asleep right before I started writing this. Writing took first place among my list of to-dos for the morning. And now that I'm done, she's awake and hungry. So the rest--like washing my face or finishing the laundry from yesterday--are forced onto the back-burner. Until the next nap.

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Sleep.

Last night, my maniacal pumping regime finally paid off. I think it was somewhere around the tenth incoherent sentence and inexplicable crying fit that Jason told me to go upstairs and sleep. I had enough milk stored (plus the supplements we're using) for him to handle the feeding for the night, and since he didn't have to work the next morning and I hadn't gotten more than a two hour stretch in the past two weeks, I finally decided it was time to let go a little.

Maybe other mothers can commiserate. Especially, I think, at first--it's hard to believe your baby can be okay without you hovering over her.

Because Jason has a pretty physically demanding job and works his ass off, and I took time off specifically for this purpose, I've been taking on the bulk of the care-taking, especially at night. And while I might bitch and moan about not sleeping, a tiny part of me loves (or, loved, I guess, since we've already thrown the bottle into the mix) being the only one who can feed her.

So even though I desperately, DESPERATELY needed a night to sleep, I knew it was going to be a tiny battle letting go. And I woke up every two hours, still. I heard her crying once around 3 a.m. and it took every part of me to stay upstairs, to not intervene, to know that her father, the love of my life and most capable, caring man I've ever met, could handle it.

And I slept. This feeling of being rested makes all the hours spent hooked up to a sucking machine that makes me feel more like a cow than a mother worth it. I slept for seven (SEVEN!) hours. And now I feel so wonderful I swear I could clean the entire house and shower and straighten my hair and shave my legs and lift a building ten feet in the air.

Instead I think I'll just sit here and stare at Adelyn, who's sleeping in my lap, perfectly fed, cleaned, clothed, and changed even without my intervention.

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Life A.B. (After Baby)

I knew it was going to be hard.

We brought her home Wednesday morning, after just two short days in the hospital. The entire way home, she slept peacefully. I sat with her in the backseat, letting her hold on to my finger, staring in bewilderment at this person we created. And I couldn't help wonder how, or why, they let us go home with a baby. The hospital made us take a 15 minute class on childcare, and I learned how to clean her umbilical cord stump and to not lift anything heavier than the baby for a few weeks. That's where the lesson ended.

The first day home was filled with visitors. Adelyn has no shortage of fans and family members and friends who genuinely love her. So even though the first day back from the hospital I barely held my baby, I was also able to take a much needed break, a moment to catch my breath and let reality sink in.

Then the visitors all went home, the sun went down, and reality really sank in.

The only plan I had for our sleeping arrangement was that Adelyn would sleep in the pack-n-play in our bedroom until we felt comfortable putting her in her room. No plan B. No thought given to the fact that she might not want to sleep in the pack-n-play, or at all when we want her to. Have I mentioned I have no experience with babies?

In the hospital, we got back to our post-partum room around midnight, a few hours after she was born. Adelyn was still in the nursery. They told me they'd bring her by around 4 a.m. to try breastfeeding for the first time, and that the pediatrician would be in at 7.

Jason and I stayed up talking, replaying every moment of the whirlwind day, until 3. The hour between that and breastfeeding practice was not spent sleeping, but simply trying to settle my racing mind.

The second night in the hospital, even under the influence of painkillers, I slept only 3 hours. I wanted to feed Adelyn exclusively, so they brought her into the room every two hours to practice. Ten minutes before she was due to come in I'd wake up with a start, excited to see her again.

So by the time we got home after enduring the most exhausting ordeal of my life, I was running on five hours of sleep throughout the past three days (the night before I went into labor I didn't sleep thanks to contractions every 20 minutes). Jason had fared a little better, but not by much.

The first night at home I slept in--literally--five minute intervals. I couldn't help myself from checking on her every second. And she woke up every 20 minutes. As it turns out, Adelyn refuses to stay asleep laying flat on her back. We spent the first three nights home taking turns coming downstairs to sleep so she could snooze in her bouncer, which she loves. It took three days of sleep deprivation before we had the genius idea to bring the bouncer upstairs to the bedroom (because common sense hadn't yet prevailed). Now we've had two nights of relatively decent rest. She'll pass out for a good two and half hours before she's ready to eat again (I've been feeding her every two hours during the day, two to three at night). And I'm slowly, slowly learning to trust that she's okay and doesn't need my constant poking and proding and breath-monitoring.

I guess, for right now, it's just a matter of survival. We'll figure out the more permanent stuff later.

And just for the record--I love advice. Any words of wisdom on how you dealt with the first few tumultuous weeks are definitely appreciated.

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Introducing Adelyn Belle.

I so badly want to write about what happened, about the most intense, wonderful, terrifying, beautiful, exhausting experience of my life--but I literally do not yet have the wherewithal or energy to give it justice. As it turns out, having a newborn at home makes it really tricky to get enough rest. Who would have thought??

But, for now, let me introduce Adelyn Belle, the most beautiful and amazing creature I've ever seen. Born January 25, 2010 at 9:48 PM. 7 pounds and 5.2 ounces. She arrived after just 45 minutes of pushing and a freakishly fast labor (or, at least, it seemed), once I found out at my 1 PM doctor's appointment that same day that I was, in fact, experiencing contractions (I was in denial). No Pitocin needed, only the smallest tear endured, and the most miraculous human as the result.

Welcome to the world, Adelyn Belle.

Stay tuned for the labor story. For now, Adelyn has decided to sleep. And so I must follow suit.

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