I also read a thick volume on babies, their development, and everything in between. In it, the authors stressed the benefits of “attachment style parenting” - feeding on demand, cosleeping, and baby wearing. And that sounded like a great idea, too.
Then we had our baby. The first few days after he was born, none of us were on any semblance of a schedule. We just kind of went with the flow. Whenever baby Kristopher cried or whined, I fed him. It was kind of exhausting.
Finally, I decided I would try out this feeding schedule. I started out feeding him every hour (while he was awake). That may sound like a lot, but it was further apart than what I had been doing before. Little man would feed for maybe four minutes at a time, then be done. Even though his feedings were very close together, I felt I could actually get stuff done. I could lay him in his bouncer, work around the house and know he was just fine. If he’d start to whine, I’d look at the clock, see that I had ten minutes and work at a couple things before feeding him.
My sister-in-law recommended working at stretching the time between his feedings, adding about 15 minutes at a time. While baby Kris, and frankly neither did I, did not enjoy those extra 15-30 minutes of hunger and crying, we slowly trained his tummy to stretch to 3 hours between feedings. I was doing this consistently for a while and things were going pretty well.
We just always had grumpy mid-mornings and evenings. Baby K wasn’t really sleeping as much as I thought new babies were supposed to. He’d sleep pretty well at night (usually waking once, sometimes twice), but during the day, only had one longish nap and a couple cat naps. I told my mom about this, and she suggested I put little K down for a nap an hour and a half following the start of his last feeding, whether he acted tired or not.
Right away, things took a turn for the better. My little man always fell asleep right away when I laid him down, woke up when it was feeding time, and rarely did we have those grumpy evenings.
It’s been two months since I’ve implemented the eat, wake, nap cycle and things are going very well. Though baby K rarely sleeps through the night, our days still go much smoother.
This is a basic idea of what his feeding and napping schedule looks like:
7:00 AM Nurse
8:30 AM Nap
10:00 AM Nurse
11:30 AM Nap
1:00 PM Nurse
2:30 PM Nap
4:00 PM Nurse
5:30 PM Nap
7:00 PM Nurse
8:30 PM Bedtime
12:00-3:00 AM Nurse
Because I don’t always feed him at the same time first thing in the morning, our day doesn’t always look exactly like this, but this is a pretty good idea. Now that I’ve been so consistent with his schedule, I can easily fudge if I need to - feed him 30 to 60 minutes early or up to 60 minutes late and he does just fine. He now starts to rub his eyes exactly 1 ½ hours after his feeding and he will go right to sleep when I lay him down.
What would I change with our next baby? Start sleep training much earlier (within a week of being born). It may be tough at the beginning, but it’s so worth it later!
I could never figure out this stuff, so good for you!
ReplyDeleteAlso, your posts view much better on my phone now since Kris fixed it! Let me know if my blog is weird to view too...