Random MomBlog

I learned the 10-minute tip with my first child. Once Karston fell asleep on my lap, I needed to wait 10 minutes (with a margin of two minutes) before getting up from the rocker to transfer him to his crib. If I (fell asleep and) waited more than 12 minutes, he would wake up when I set him down. If I didn’t wait at least 8 minutes, but usually 10, he would wake up as I stood up. The magic wait was 10 minutes. Just 10 minutes asleep on my lap, then put him to bed. The 10-minute trick also works on Cale.

The 25-minute tip is more subtle, but just as magical. I didn’t notice this one with Karston because I was so busy learning the more obvious ones, but in retrospect, I think it also applied. For the nights when Cale wants to nurse to sleep, we can’t spend more than 25 minutes in the chair before Cale goes in his crib. When he nurses to sleep, it’s often difficult to tell when he falls asleep, so this rule covers that case. At the 15-minute mark, I try to stop the nursing so that he gets 10 minutes of pure sleep, but last night worked fine with 20 minutes of nursing and 5 minutes snoozing on boppy on my lap. Cale will stay asleep as I put him in his crib and pull up the covers if we move at the 25-minute mark; otherwise he wakes up. He also sleeps better if I stick with the 25-minute plan.

Don’t think that this means bedtime is a 25-minute routine! There’s a whole series of actions leading up to it, from cleaning up to kisses to bedtime stories. Last night Cale cried when I finished the third book (he and his brother get 3 books at bedtime), so I let him pick his favorite (Little Gorilla) and how many times (twice) to re-read it. I’m glad he loves books!

Cale was sleeping so well (most of the time, and in comparison to the past two months and especially the past week) from birth until six months of age that the decline to worse and worse sleeping patterns has been distressing. So, back to the research! First, how much sleep does he need? Of course there’s a wide range for individual variation, but at 9 months, the healthy average is 11 hours at night, and 3 hours in two daytime naps. Wow. Nowhere close. We slid from 2 hours on his own down to 10 minutes, and sleeping together wasn’t restful for either of us. A 1991 reference and a newer 2007 reference both say falling asleep with a parent is linked to night waking. Falling asleep with a parent is the main behavior (to change) mentioned in a review of the first article. Since Cale’s been falling sound asleep while nursing, I figured that was the problem. He used to get so drowsy while nursing, and I would put him in his crib awake-but-not-for-long. Argh! [Here I’m thinking it’s my fault for allowing him to slip into poor sleep hygiene.]

Then I looked back at my own post on sleeping at 9 months, and discovered that night sleeping peaks at six months, and drops at nine months (and doesn’t get much better by one year). So I was discouraged, not sure there was any cure other than time! [Now I’m thinking it can’t even be fixed.]

Two nights ago, Cale woke up when I put him in his crib, and he wouldn’t let me set him down. I’d spent so much time trying to get him down that I told him he was just going to have to hang out with me doing Mommy things until I was ready to go to bed with him. He fell asleep on my shoulder within half an hour while I was on my computer. I put him in his crib, and he slept there for almost 5 hours!!! I slept on my own for most of that time, and it was fabulous! I was perfectly happy to let him nurse and cuddle until morning after that treat. Last night I wanted to send out one email before his bedtime routine, and once again Cale fell asleep on my shoulder. He slept 7 hours in his crib last night! On top of that, when I was ready to go to bed last night, I heard Cale shaking the rails of his crib, but not calling out for me. He does know how to put himself back to sleep! It was music to my ears to hear him awake but not needing me.

My first theory was that the improvement was putting him to sleep with boredom, instead of nursing him to sleep. You know what they say about nursing babies to sleep: Baby falls asleep in his favorite place (Mommy’s lap) doing his favorite activity (nursing); when Baby wakes up, he’s alone in the dark so no wonder he cries! With a normal healthy baby, I’d try bedtime variations that require less parental intervention, like going from nursing to sleep to falling asleep from boredom. I think it’s a reasonable step toward independent falling asleep. But I don’t think (anymore) that that applies to Cale yet.

But then something clicked for me! Now that I’ve had some sleep, I can sometimes think again! (It’s so nice; you should try it! Sleep is good stuff.) When is breast feeding ever wrong? Clearly though, Cale sleeps better when he doesn’t breast feed before bed. We all know breast milk is the best food in the world for babies, by a huge margin. Since breast milk speeds through his system faster, maybe he gets hungry sooner? No, I’ve actually tested not letting him nurse when I pick him up to start a tiresome full-contact baby-cuddling night, and he’s fine either way. He’ll nurse if I offer, but if I don’t offer then he’s fine waiting until 5 or 6 in the morning when he actually is hungry. So it’s not hunger. In retrospect, I can’t believe I didn’t see this sooner, but there’s only one reason why my breast milk causes any problem for Cale. His allergies. His allergy to milk is major, as evidenced by his pooping response. (His barley allergy showed up as a primary reaction, meaning he ate baby food with barley and was out-of-sorts afterwards; it hasn’t been tested through me.) His allergy to soy and eggs is minor, and was only detected by Cale sleeping poorly when I had two Boca burgers for dinner and when I had an omelette for dinner. Thunderclap! Minor food allergies to what I eat show up as a sleeping problem! Cale’s absolutely terrible sleeping patterns lately have nothing to do with sleep declines at nine months, nothing to do with falling asleep with a parent, and everything to do with his allergies. Good sleep hygiene is good, but Cale’s problem is allergies.

I need to try a complete elimination diet. Or, conversely, only eat food stuffs that are in his baby food. There’s something here, and if I can get some sleep, I might be able to figure it out!

At some level, I think we always knew this, but hadn’t codified it. Last night at bedtime, Karston said, Tummy still hurting. I don’t want to fall asleep. Just like that, he strung together his poor eating with his poor sleeping. I asked a few more questions, and Karston said he didn’t want to fall asleep while his tummy was hurting because then he has bad dreams. I’m impressed that he figured out that connection on his own just a few weeks shy of 3.5 years old. This makes me more confident in what was previously just my intuition: fix his eating first, then see if we still need to fix his sleeping.

I just wish I knew where to start! At Cale’s 9-month well-child-checkup yesterday, the pediatrician said we can try Zantac with Prevacid. She also gave us a prescription for Nexium to try next, to tide us over with ideas until Karston’s specialist appointment on February 25th. Everything we’ve tried so far gets less and less effective over the course of one month, and it’s very disheartening. He’s still on Prevacid because it’s holding ground to a little better than where he was before treatment; without it, he crashes to new lows.

I think Daddy hit on something yesterday when he said Cale eats every 2 hours. Cale does that at night too. Well, mostly. His longest sleep is the first round, and that’s when we feed him baby food before I nurse him to sleep (two kinds of food, and sometimes he sleeps 4 hours). Then on the better nights, he cries about every 2 hours, and I can nurse him back to sleep in 30 minutes (so I can sleep almost 1:30 out of every 2 hours). On bad nights, it’s an hour to get him asleep, and he sometimes wakes the second he touches his crib.

I’m going to ponder better ways to fill his tummy. Although he usually has gas (often enough silent, and I feel it when my hand is on his butt, makes me suspect that he might have gas when my hand isn’t there) when he wakes up. Hmm. So I need to reduce his gas and increase how much is in his tummy, and then I can sleep again. Hmm. Hoping for ideas to jump into my sleep-deprived brain.

I was once told there were two types of insomnia, sleep acquisition (can’t fall asleep) and sleep inhibition (can’t stay asleep). Luckily I usually only have one kind, can’t fall asleep. So I was asked how I fall asleep. I’ve listed before some of what works for me.

My friend Alison said she would take 0.5 mg of melatonin when she couldn’t fall asleep, followed by a second dose 30 minutes later if she still weren’t asleep, and that always worked for her. That never worked for me, so I gave her the rest of my bottle. Then I learned that melatonin is released when your eyelids don’t have any light on them, so I tried the eye shield, and that has worked well for me. As it turns out, the proper dose is 0.3 mg of melatonin instead. Melatonin is also effective for insomnia in ADHD children!

White noise is my other major aid along with an eye shield. However, I’ve also considered listening to an audiobook or podcast as I fall asleep. (Interesting note about working memory and falling asleep, sounds like it would also be effective for me.)

Other tactics … I try to switch off multi-tasking (thinking about everything) by concentrating on something, like the white noise, or my breathing if I have no congestion to distract me. If focus doesn’t work then I think about thinking about nothing until my mind is clear.

I like to do static stretches before bed and when I can’t sleep. It runs off some energy, and it aligns my body. Then I climb into bed, making sure that I’m super-comfy with no pain points, all symmetric joints aligned, and no twists.

Here I was, thinking I was doing well to reduce my insomnia to half an hour (or less!), but this study says I should keep working on it.
First,

they found that poor sleep is associated with greater psychological distress and higher levels of biomarkers associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. They also found that these associations are stronger in women than in men.

Since I do have some issues with blood sugar, the mention of diabetes caught my eye.

“Interestingly, it appears that it’s not so much the overall poor sleep quality that was associated with greater risk, but rather the length of time it takes a person to fall asleep that takes the highest toll. Women who reported taking a half hour or more to fall asleep showed the worst risk profile.

OK, I’ll stay in sleep school a while longer!

Right after I turned 21, I discovered I had insomnia while snowed in playing Trivial Pursuits with friends before exams. The question for me was, How long does the average American take to fall asleep? The answer was multiple choice, all of the choices were under 20 minutes, and IIRC the correct answer was 7 minutes. My answer for me at that time was 2 hours, pretty consistently, for as long as I could recall. Years of grad school, especially later with the time demands of grad school and a full-time job, trimmed that down to 30 minutes. Nowadays, even that would be a long time to fall asleep for me. How did I do it?Like everyone, I started with the standard suggestions for insomnia, also called good sleep hygiene. For further research, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

What works for me from the standard suggestions are a sleep mask / eye shield to block light and white noise from a fan. If there’s any ambient light, I can’t sleep without covering my eyes. I first starting sleeping with a fan on when I was an undergrad living in a dorm that was noisy all night. I used the fan to block the distracting sounds. In addition to insomnia, I’m also a light sleeper. Not the best combination! Back then, if I woke up, even just to pee, I needed yet another 2 hours to fall asleep again. Now I’m conditioned: fan on means fall asleep, using the bathroom in the dark means fall asleep as soon as I’m back to my pillow. If I’m not falling asleep now, going to the bathroom in the dark can help. What a change from when that was a guarantee to wake me up!

In addition, I have some of my own tricks, most learned when I was pregnant the first time. First of all, I need enough pillows to be perfectly comfortable in a neutral position. I can’t fall asleep on my back, and I sure was not going to pick up tummy sleeping while pregnant! I have bursitis in my right hip, so I sleep on my left side. [The thought of bursitis in my left hip terrifies me!] I have a contoured pillow supporting my head and neck so that my upper spine is straight. When I’m not pregnant and I have a figure, I have a pillow under my waist to keep my lower spine straight and aligned. I have another pillow between my knees to keep my legs parallel to prevent strain on my hips. I sometimes put a long body pillow between my knees to hug so that my left shoulder moves forward instead of getting compressed. The waist pillow is only the second-best tip in this pile of pillows; the best tip is the neutral position. Once I learned how to feel when my hips were aligned, with the right hip neither higher (closer to my head) nor farther forward than the left hip, most of my sleep issues vanished. I didn’t think I was in (that much) pain, but a non-twisted well-aligned sleeping position has made an enormous difference.

Another gem that is nearly impossible to follow now that I have kids but has made a huge difference is to go to sleep the very first time I feel sleepy. The little voice that says I’m tired is very, very quiet in me. However, if I listen closely and go to bed then, I fall asleep quickly and sleep very well. If I ignore that voice, I get a strong second wind and have trouble falling asleep. If I’m watching TV, I tape it; the sports game or the show is more fun to watch when I’m well rested. If I’m working on a project, I’ll be happier to pick it up in the morning when I feel happy about being well rested. Really, everything will still be there in the morning after a good night’s sleep!

I do have to tell my brain to shut up most nights (unless I heeded that little voice about bedtime). I clear my mind and refuse to think; that helps. GTD helps in general, as does keeping a PDA next to the bed so I can write down whatever is on my mind and go back to the blank mind with a clear conscience, knowing that I will remember to pick up that thought when I check my PDA in the morning. I don’t think I’m anxious, but I understand that not being able to fall asleep because the brain is too busy tends to a sign of anxiety. Since GTD helps, I can’t really argue otherwise except to say I don’t think I feel anxious.

I can’t fall asleep if I have cold feet. Once I learned that tip from my mother, I was amazed how effective it was! The first time, I could actually feel myself falling asleep just as my head touched the pillow, while I could feel waves of warmth from my slippers. I have some trouble falling asleep if my feet are hot, but cold feet make it almost impossible to fall asleep. Either one of those can be an indication of needing more exercise, to get the blood flowing properly so those extremities are not too hot or too cold.

Contrary to the established suggestions, I find exercise right before bed does help; in fact, if I can’t sleep, I get up to do my evening exercise routine. However, I’m not doing heart-pumping cardiovascular fitness, or even sweat-inducing strength training. All the way at the other end of the exercise spectrum, I’m doing static stretching for flexibility. It gets the blood moving freely, lungs open, head cleared, with body relaxed and aligned. I usually work from Brill’s The Core Program, and add in some of my stand-by static stretches. That routine relaxes me so much that I’m ready to fall asleep; as a bonus, it makes it easier for me to find that neutrally-aligned position in my nest of pillows.

Health, Personal