Author: Kelly

We visited two pumpkin patches this year, one up by our house and another down near where my parents live. I’m excited by the prospect of having trick-or-treaters this year, if the hurricane doesn’t wash them all away.

At both pumpkin patches, we let her play with a tiny pumpkin

Here she is with my mom, eating it.

Getting her to smile at the camera is a challenge. Mostly she just chewed her lip.

We’re not doing much for Halloween this year, too busy with other things, but I do love a good pumpkin. The small family farm near my parents’ house has been there for 37 years! It’s especially impressive given how land values in the area have shot up in the few decades. It’s sort of an odd little place, selling plants, pumpkins, Christmas trees, and a rather large collection of cement statues.

What are you doing for Halloween this year?

We started sleep training with Bitmap last week, and I’ve been posting mini-updates to Facebook. Here’s the full run down.

We did both naps and overnight all at the same time, thinking it would be less confusing for her.  The first day went pretty well; I checked her at 1, 3, and 5 minute intervals. There were mild complaints when I put her down for naps and bed, and the first few times she woke up she settled down pretty quickly thereafter. The third time she cried for maybe a total of 15 minutes, which is actually pretty normal even if we do pick her up.

The second day / night was a lot more challenging. Every nap and bedtime was met with fighting, even if she was very tired. She woke up 3 times and took about 20 minutes total get back down each time. After the second day I was feeling pretty doubtful that things would work.

On the third night we got rid of her pacifier, cold turkey. The theory was that if she fell asleep with it in, it would be confusing and upsetting to not have it there when she woke up. Also at this point we were willing to try anything. We were both shredded from weeks of not sleeping more than a few hours at a time. If night three went like night two, I was ready to beg RD’s parents to take her overnight so we could recover and figure out something else to try.

She stirred a bunch in the earlier parts of the night, but never really got up to crying, and then we all slept from ~2am to 6am. Victory! I tried hard to have realistic expectations of infant sleep; The goal wasn’t to get her to sleep through the night, just enough to regain our higher brain function. You know you’re sleep deprived when a 4 hour stretch of sleep is restorative.

That was Friday night and since then she’s been sleeping 8+ hours each night. It’s pretty great. She’s also getting better about napping in her crib; most of the time she falls asleep as soon as I set her down.

And so our baby has been Ferberized.  If Bitmap hadn’t already given up night nursing on her own I wouldn’t have even remotely considered it. Or if it sounded like she was crying herself to sleep (which she would previously do –  in our arms – on a regular basis). Would I recommend it to everyone? Absolutely not. But it’s working for us so far, and I think we’re all happier as a result.

This post is about infant sleep, and sleep training, which is a particularly touchy subject. I welcome any stories about what worked for you and your family, but any comments asserting that any method is the “one true way” or damning others for the choices they made will be summarily deleted.

Bitmap has crossed the 4 month mark, and is now officially no longer a newborn. And for a while there, her sleep was getting progressively better and better. 4 hour stretches, 5 hour stretches, and then we experienced the magesty of 8 hour stretches of uninterrupted baby sleep! It was incredible!

And then it all stopped. We were back to 5 hours, then 4, then 3…

Nothing changed as far as I can tell, but for the past few weeks Bitmap has been waking up every two hours. And it’s killing me. I’ve gone from coffee-fueled-but-functional to an angry zombie, biting off the head of anyone foolish enough to talk to me (i.e. RevolvingDork). And suddenly I’ve gone from “cry it out is cruel, Dr Ferber is a jerk who hates babies” to “I am a jerk to who hates babies, this has got to change.” And so I got a copy of Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems.

I did not come to this conclusion easily. First, we set up a veritable paradise of sleep. Perfect temperature, nice and dark, comfy clothes, white noise machine, etc. Seriously I get sleepy just walking into that room. We tried more food at the bedtime feeding, less food, swaddling, no swaddling, pacifier, no pacifier, loud music, soft music… if it was listed on the internet as a baby sleep aid, we tried it.

The second important thing is that Bitmap has shown us she’s developmentally ready to sleep through the night. Although she wakes up and cries, she’s no longer nursing at night and her diaper is often dry. In fact, half the time she doesn’t even need to be picked up; popping the pacifier back in her mouth is enough to get her to go back to sleep. She also has shown the ability to self-settle on the odd occasion I can’t respond to her right away.  And most importantly, she’s slept 8 hours straight on multiple occasions.

The third thing is the fact that our sleep situation wasn’t working for us. Some people can handle getting up in the night, some people co-sleep and that works great for them. In fact, RD co-sleeps beautifully with Bitmap, but I can’t sleep with a baby in the bed. I’m not just tired, I’m bordering non-functional. As in, due to my zombie-like state, I put liquid hand soap on my toothbrush. Let’s not enumerate the number of stupid things I’ve snapped at RD for this week.

So tonight we begin Ferberizing. I do think it’s important that anyone considering doing so actually read the book, because it has a number of differences from the nickel tour I’ve read on the internet. This is about coming up with something that works for our baby. Not all babies, not most babies, our baby.

I have little tolerance for crying so we’re starting with 1, 3, and 5 minute intervals. At bedtime we bathe her, swaddle her, feed her, give her a pacifier, and read her a story. Then it’s into bed she goes, protesting or not. Naptime is similar, except instead of bathing and feeding I rock her while singing a song. At the end of the song, bed.

When I put her down for her nap this morning, she was not pleased. But I also knew she was very tired. After a minute of whining I went back in, replaced her pacifier, and sang her a song. She was still cranky when I left. Not really crying, just sort of complaining. About a minute later she was quiet, and shortly after that I snuck in to check on her. Sound asleep.

The pacifier is an issue, because if she wakes up and it’s fallen out she gets upset. But we have to cut down on her daytime pacifier use before working on that. And she’s getting too big for swaddling, so we’ll need to phase that out too. Maybe after tonight I’ll decided this is horrible and I don’t want to do it any more, but we’re trying it out. If it doesn’t work, we’ll do something else- just like everything else in parenting.

RD had to go to work in the city and now that the school year started we no longer have his aunt coming by in the afternoons. So I decided to go up to NYC with him and wander around the city with Bitmap. Seemed like a nice alternative to sitting around the house / walking the canal path for the 8000th time.

Our day started bright and early at 6:30am. Of course the one time we had to get up early, Bitmap finally decided to sleep past 6. Babies, amiright?

With all three of us going up driving is the cheapest option. We drove to Jersey City (our old neighborhood), parked the car, and took the PATH train to midtown. I stopped by RD’s office to show off the baby, and all productivity ground to a halt from 10 to 10:30, at which point I made a beeline for the nearest Starbucks. And before you get all judgmental about going to a Starbucks in a city with real coffee shops, I used to work in midtown and all the coffee there is terrible. Plus Starbucks has bathrooms.

From there we walked to Washington Square Park, which is a little over two miles. I was carrying Bitmap in the Ergo on my front and a backpack full of laptop and diapers on my back, so I was ready to sit down by the time we got there. The Ergo is a lifesaver though, I can’t imagine trying to navigate NYC with a bulky stroller. While we were there, Bitmap brandished her butt to the world for a park bench diaper change.

We visited my friend Skiff at QLabs. They have a nice office, with a pool table, rock wall, and some giant beanbag chairs with an extremely unfortunate name. Skiff fawned over Bitmap and recounted the following conversation:

Raphael: You know there’s a tech bubble right now, right?
Skiff: Well, yeah but it’s different this time, it’s not like the ’90s bubble.
Raphael: Does your office have a pool table in it?
Skiff: Damn.

From there we headed to Brooklyn to visit friends, and I went through Fulton Mall where I used to spend a fair amount of time thanks to working at Etsy and hacking at NYC Resistor. Both of those have since moved out of the Fulton Mall area, and it was a little weird to be back in the  neighborhood.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the people on the train who are most likely to offer you a seat are those who might need it themselves. On the PATH home, a man on crutches saw me standing with the baby and offered me a seat. I declined, Bitmap demands that I stand and bounce her, and then I noticed that the man was missing a leg. Similar things happened when I was pregnant: it’s never the able-bodied guy in a business suit who offers a pregnant lady a seat, it’s the 80something woman who remembers what it was like to stand all day on swollen feet.

After taking care of some things at the condo it was 10:45 when we got home. All three of us were beat (though Bitmap still found the energy to wake up at 3am…). But it was a successful trip and a nice change of pace.