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Bedtime Routines for Rocking My Baby to Sleep

August 16, 2011 at 10:43 pm , by 

Nine months.

Now that I’ve been a parent for nine months (as long as my wife was pregnant with our son), I have gained some confidence in finding some consistency with this whole thing. Through some quick Internet research, I taught myself how to get Jack to sleep through the night. Granted, he almost always puts up a fight when it’s bedtime, but even he recognizes the comfort of routine.

The last bit of fun that happens for him before his bedtime routine is that he gets a bath, along with plenty of attention from my wife and I.  But once I walk into the bedroom with him for bedtime, it’s all business: I don’t look at him, smile at him, touch his skin, talk to him, or feed him.  This may seem a bit harsh, but the key is to not engage him or emotionally comfort him in any way.

Comfort is only obtained by him falling asleep. Granted, I make sure he’s physically comfortable as I’m holding him and rocking him.  The room, the blanket, the tone I set; it’s all exclusive to his daily bedtime routine and naps.  It’s the only time he experiences that version of me.

Note: In the following pictures you will see me demonstrating with a Sleep Sheep, not my actual son.  The flash on the camera while he’s trying to fall asleep would have been pretty counterproductive!

My son knows that when I sit him down on his bedroom floor and he watches me unfold his blanket on the extra twin bed, I am about to pick him up to wrap him in a “baby burrito.” Or maybe it’s more like a “baby corn husk” because he likes to have his arms hanging out.

The moment I put my hands under his arms to lift him, he stands up, then leans back Matrix style facing the blanket, hysterically crying as he turns towards the bed.  I call it his “wailing wall” routine.

But sure enough, the moment I lay him down on that blanket and begin to wrap him up, he gets quiet and calms down. He lets me rock him for a minute with his head resting on my bicep (my left arm) and my right hand supporting his lower back; then he starts trying to sit up as to escape my embrace.

So I challenge him: I slightly tilt him backwards to make it harder to sit up. After he has completed three or four of what I call his “impossible sit-ups,” he’s ready to give in to my comforting strength.  Usually by that point he is officially ready to fall asleep.

To hypnotize him into a “sleep trance,” I “shoosh” him to the rhythm of the first line of “This Old Man.”  Then when his eyes close and he starts a slower breathing pattern, I switch to a “Darth Vader snoring” noise to match him. He is asleep at this point.

After a minute or so, when I can see he is in a decently deep sleep, I quickly set him down in his Graco Travel Lite crib and start rocking it back and forth like he’s in a boat at sea.  A minute later, I sneak out of the room, still making my “Darth Vader snoring” white noise until I shut the door.

If he wakes up later during the night, I wait ten minutes before going in to help him back to sleep.  The reason is that almost every time, he falls back asleep on his own.  Usually he’s just transitioning into different sleep cycles when I hear him cry for a minute or so.

It’s weird, but it’s the routine that he and I share every evening at 7 o’clock.  It used to take 90 minutes to get him to sleep and he would continue waking up every few hours to be fed again.  Now, it only takes around 10 minutes or less and he usually sleeps through the night undisturbed until 6:20 AM the next morning. That’s the power and comfort of routine.

I have to put some perimeters on the sometimes overwhelming open-endedness of life. I can’t imagine things any other way.

This has been a sequel to “Getting My Infant to Sleep through the Night,” which itself was a sequel to “Is It Wrong to Let Your Baby Cry It Out?“.

Additionally, it is also a spin-off of “There’s a Certain Comfort in Routine.”

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Baby on Board: Jack’s Taxi Service

August 15, 2011 at 9:40 pm , by 

Eight months.

For nearly a month now, Jack has been going to day care as my wife and I have returned to our jobs here in Nashville.  I work only a block away from where he is all day, so I’m the one to chauffeur him an hour round trip five days a week.

Those “Baby on Board” suction cup signs on cars always crack me up.  I’m only pretty sure that a careless driver isn’t going to have the gumption to read one of those signs, then stop and think, “Oh! That car has a baby inside. Man, I need to slow down and focus.”  Or maybe there’s some secret society of people playing bumper cars with their cars out on the highway and they only break for vehicles with the “Baby on Board” signs.

Needless to say, there is no little plastic yellow sign stuck on a window of my Honda Element, but I do indeed drive a vehicle containing precious cargo.  With my baby on board, I feel like his bodyguard.  The Pope has the Popemobile; Jack has his Toaster on Wheels, his Big Green Lunch Box, his Wind-Up Toy Car- your choice.

I know there are cities with crazier drivers in America, but for those 60 minutes a day I drive him around in Nashville, I have to assume that every other person is a maniac who is drinking their fifth 5-Hour Energy drink and Tweeting on their phone while I drive alongside them.  I have to assume that at any given moment, a startled deer will jump out in front of the car.  I have to assume that Wile E. Coyote poured a bucket of Acme grease on the road in front of me in attempt to catch the Roadrunner.

In the meantime, Jack is asleep half the time as I jam out to any given Weezer album.  As for the time he’s awake, I assume he’s like me: in deep thoughts about A) the unfortunate impossibilities of time travel, B) whether or not God likes the music of Dave Matthews Band; if so, what is His favorite song, and C) who would win in a fight- A.C. Slater from Saved By the Bell or Uncle Jesse from Full House?

For now, Jack’s vocabulary doesn’t extend past “dada,” “mehm-mehm-mehm-mehm,” and “ba-ba-ba-ba.”.  But eventually, he and I will be able to have some normal conversations during the morning and afternoon car rides.  I can ask him what he learned in pre-school that day.

Until then, we’re both just sort of in our shared solitude, looking in opposite directions.  Every so often though, I turn around real quick to make sure he hasn’t somehow escaped his car seat and wandered off.  Then I see those happy little feet and know that my baby is still on board.

Look how cool Honda Elements are! The back seats can fold up and into the side of the car or all the way back (as seen in the picture of this one).

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Jack William Meets Evan Carlos

August 11, 2011 at 11:11 pm , by 

Eight months.

Though Jack has been attending day care for a couple of weeks now, I still have been wondering what it would be like when he would be exposed to another little boy about his age and size, in a different environment.  I had these preconceived  ideas that it might be difficult for them to get along, fighting over toys.  I envisioned myself cringing, just waiting for the moment when one of them would smack the other in the forehead with a wooden block or a Matchbox car.

I guess I forgot that infant boys don’t have that much testosterone, yet. Fortunately, Jack’s first encounter with a buddy wasn’t at all as I bleakly imagined it.  While in Sacramento last week, we visited Jill’s childhood friend, Paula; she and her husband had their first child just a few months before Jack was born.

It was funny to observe Jack and Evan (Paula’s son) playing next to each other from the same toy box. Several times they reached for the same toy, then they would both simultaneously back off from it, as if to say, “No, it’s cool.  You go ahead. You saw it first.”

If only we lived in a world with “baby subtitles,” where we adults could translate what our children are saying to us and each other.

For most of the visit, I imagined  in my head what their conversations were like as they were playmates:

“So, you’re Evan? Yeah, my mom has talked a lot about you.  Actually, I’ve seen a lot of your pictures on Facebook.  There’s this one where you’re wearing one of those taxi cab driver hats.  My mom got me one of those but I kept taking it off because I can’t stand having stuff on my head.  It makes me itch.”

“Yep, I’ve heard of you too.  I wonder why our moms are laughing at us right now.  I’m hungry.  Let’s eat.  Wahhhhh!!! Waahhhh! Ehhhhh…”.

“Okay, sounds good.  Bluhhh!!!  Mehm-mehm-mehm-mehm…”.

Being that Jill and Paula grew up together and remain friends despite the long distance and that they still see each other at least once a year when we fly out to California in the summer, I think it’s safe to say that Jack and Evan will grow up knowing each other too.  Even if that means just one actual play date a year and in the meantime their Mommies pointing to a Facebook picture, saying, “Look, here’s your buddy.”

Jack has made his first friend.

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In Flight Entertainment from Sacramento to Phoenix

August 9, 2011 at 11:51 pm , by 

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Getting My Infant to Sleep through the Night

August 8, 2011 at 9:29 pm , by 

Eight months.

“Crying it out” plus “cold turkey” equals “everybody’s happy!”

It was only pretty recently (the beginning of July) that I was able to master getting my infant son Jack to sleep.  After he learned to crawl at six months old, my wife nor I were no longer able to get him to sleep without him (and us) getting extremely upset.  So I tried my own version of the “cry it out” method and it has worked great.  I highly recommend it.

Unfortunately, we soon realized that the getting to sleep was only the first half of the problem.  Even though we could get him to fall asleep, he was not able to remain asleep for more than a couple of hours.  That meant that none of the three of us were ever getting enough sleep (especially my wife and my son).  Additionally, it meant our son was drinking at least three bottles of formula during the night and therefore needing three additional diaper changes.

After a decent amount of research, and obviously acknowledging the immediate effectiveness of the “cry it out” method, my wife gave me the green light to apply the “cold turkey” method to get him to sleep through the night without needing to eat.  So I did.  And it is so awesome.  Life is beautiful, now.

Here’s what I did the first night of applying the “cold turkey” method: When I put him to sleep for the night (around 7:00 PM), I closed his bedroom door most of the way, then I didn’t come back until the morning when he cried after 6:00 AM.

On the first night of going “cold turkey,” he woke up after an hour and cried for 30 minutes straight, but then fell asleep for two solid hours.  Then he woke up and cried for 10 minutes and fell asleep for three hours.  Next he woke up and cried for 5 minutes, then another couple of hours.  As the night progressed, he continued to sleep longer and cry less.

We heard him cry at 5:40 AM, but knew not to go get him yet since it was still before 6:00 AM.  So we waited, and the next time he cried it was an hour later, and we went to go get him.

I can honestly say that the three of us were never happier to see each other in the morning.  Jack had survived his first night without eating since his dinner meal; plus, his diaper was dry.  And we, the parents, both were able to sleep more solidly than any other night while being in the same house with him.

More than a month has passed since that first night; this system has been so good for all of us.  Now when he does wake up in the middle of the night it only takes a couple of minutes for him to get back to sleep- on his own.

We had been hindering his sleep by continuing to feed him through the night; preventing him from progressing deeper into his sleep cycle because we would comfort him not only with food, but with additional soothing. Therefore we fed him too often and he never learned to fall asleep without parental help. We had been enabling him to overeat and under-sleep.

Have you half-way considered this technique, in your desperation to get your infant to sleep, but just felt that A) it was too cruel, B) it would mess up your kid psychologically, and/or C) you never knew any nice, normal parents to ever do this method?

Well, I am indeed a nice, normal parent who believes in the importance of raising my son in the most positively reinforced ways possible. I came to the conclusion I was hurting him more by not teaching him to fall asleep on his own.  And I can obviously see that, so far, I have not messed him up psychologically and he still treats me the same.

But if you should have any doubts, continue reading The Dadabase every day.  That way, you can still check in on my son to make sure that both the “cry it out” and the “cold turkey” methods are not only effective, but for my son at least, they are also a good and necessary thing.