One day at a time

Alice is nearly three months old now. I can’t say that she is a colicky baby or that we’ve had any of the common sleep issues such as day/night confusion or waking up frequently in the night. She’s always slept her longest stretch at night, and her longest stretch of sleep slowly built up to the current six hours without any sleep training. She doesn’t even mind being in her crib. But sleep always begins with a bout of crying.

This morning’s feeding involved her crying during the feeding and then more crying when being burped and then crying and yawning while being rocked. Having reached her two-hour limit for being awake, Alice started yawning this morning around 8:45 a.m. and turning her head away from me to stare off into the distance. She was clearly tired. I promptly carried her into a dimly lit room and started to rock her, but she cried anyway. As Alice cried and screamed into my chest, I began again with the theories as to why sleep always had to begin like this for her. I began to ruminate over the parenting decisions I made. Breastfeeding, for example, takes too long and isn’t as predictable as formula; Alice must have lost so much precious sleep over cluster feeding and crying for more food while my boobs refill, and she must have lost so much alert time to feeding instead of learning – all because I wouldn’t swallow my pride and put her on formula. And perhaps she’d be a better sleeper if I took the initial hit and just let her cry it out for a week instead of the routine exchanges of crying and soothing tricks which seem to soothe me more than her.

I have a list of baby sleep training books that have been recommended, but I recoil at the idea that I have to resort to “training” my baby like I’ve trained my dog to defecate exactly two times a day. We used to be able to easily soothe her into a deep sleep, and, as predicted in Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, this changed at her six-week growth spurt and sleep became a daily battle thereafter. Her sleep patterns are emerging exactly according to the proposed scheduled in that book. But still, there is the crying. There must be a more effective strategy. Can I really continue on this path and give the current strategy a good, honest try?

And then the crying stopped, she fell asleep in my arms, and I took note of the time she spent crying: three minutes. It took three minutes to replay how her sleep and feeding pattern and my responses played out over the preceding 24 hours, philosophize over faulty parenting, propose a new strategy, and vow to be a better parent going forward. As she slept in my arms, I reflected upon how fragile new parenthood is that three minutes of crying can undermine every decision I’ve made to date. I reflected that she is only three months old, not old enough to share my own affinity for routine. I recalled that she has another month of development before she can appreciate a schedule. For now, one month doesn’t seem so distant and tomorrow, we’ll begin again.

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