This was another wonderful week with our beautiful baby boy, Logan. However, as before, it has had some ups and downs. We had 2 bad days (Monday and Tuesday) which helped prepare us for a little hard work starting Logan’s schedule on Wednesday. Then we had two blissful days of scheduling (and self-soothing) before things fell apart on Friday afternoon. We then changed course again last night and we’ll see how that goes (keeping schedule, lightening up on self-soothing).
Logan has been changing this week. He is showing more expression (facial and body) and interest in the world around him. He tracks things very well with his eyes (especially his favorite stuffed animals) and he smiles or grunts in response to things. It is really fun to see him start to respond to us, although still minimally for now. He loves to just gaze into our eyes (and of course we love it too!). Strangely, he is getting more difficult to pick up and hold. This could partly be because he weighs over a pound more than his birth weight according to our home scale (7 lbs 12 oz yesterday), or it could be because he is more active and likes to squirm a lot when we pick him up. It makes it a little more unnerving to pick him up right now, but I’m sure we’ll adjust.
Here are the basics of the schedule for Logan: His rotation is eat, awake and then sleep. The times we do this rotation are 6am, 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm, 2am (repeat). The 2am and 6am feedings do not have awake time and are considered night-time (and if he wakes after 12 but before 2, he can eat earlier, but he can’t go less than 3 hours or more than 5 at night).
The eating rotation is at-most 45 minutes. As our doula Deana says, you get to choose how long the kitchen is open and you try to get them to eat as much as you can in that time (i.e. no sleeping during eating time), and then it closes and if he decides he is hungry afterwards, too bad. However, if he has had his full at 30 minutes and has slept with prodding for 5 minutes, then the kitchen can close early. Having this time limit on feeding makes me feel so much more in control and less guilty about good feeds or bad. I am doing one breast per feeding, since I seem to have enough and that way he gets more of the hind milk (if you do both sides they have to drink all the lean foremilk and get less fatty hind-milk). I am also then fully pumping the side he just ate off of afterwards (though sometimes I forget or get caught up in activities). This helps keep up my supply, allows me to stockpile milk, and make my breasts feel better and not overly full (I get about 1 oz per pump or after I skip one pumping at night, about 4 oz per breast). I am having a little trouble with my right breast (it needs a lot of massage and heat to be happy), but it seems to have improved over the last day or two and I am hopeful it will continue.
The awake rotation starts with tummy-time for exercise or just gazing at mommy or daddy. He is often a bit of a snoozer during this, but usually has one good spurt of energy for exercise. Considering how darn heavy his head is, I am sure it takes considerable effort. He usually cries while he is lifting his head. We aren’t sure if he gets annoyed being on his tummy, so then starts fussing and part of that is squirming and he ends up exercising or if he decides to start exercising and finds it hard and starts fussing. They are almost always linked and almost always start at the same time. Since awake time is supposed to be positive, we let him squirm a bit (good exercise) and then cuddle him until he is happy (or just flip him to his back which he likes better). We then play with him on his back or hold him. His minimum requirement is to stay up at least 1 full hour (so 45 min food plus 15 minutes other), but his goal is to make it an hour and a half. Sometimes he does and sometimes not, but as soon as he gets too hacked off, or too sleepy, it is time to move to the sleep phase. Often he was spending most of his time on the mat rather than in our arms and we are going to adjust this moving forward.
The original goal of the sleep phase was to have him put himself to sleep and learn to self-soothe. He seemed to be really good at this at first, but really started struggling on Friday. I still think he has some skills, but he needs to have balance in his day to make it work. Starting last night, we gave up on making him cry-it-out (with occasional comforting), and Charles soothed him and comforted him to sleep for both the 6pm cycle and the 9pm cycle. He then fell asleep on his own with relatively little cuddling at 2am, and after feeding at 6am. We don’t want to always cuddle him to sleep (so that if he wakes during his nap he can put himself back to sleep), but if he needs it (crying a few minutes after going down), we will provide it. We are also going to make sure he is relatively happy, if not always sleepy when he goes to bed.
The reason we decided to adjust was that Logan seemed really off yesterday. He stopped eating well (would sleep really deep, despite prodding), then he would snooze or be angry during awake time and cry during sleep time. Then it would repeat. Our theory (and yes, we are guessing here), is that he wasn’t getting enough “holding/cuddling” time so when I was feeding him, the contact soothed him and he would fall asleep because he was exhausted. However, then when feeding time was over, he was hungry and pissed off and wouldn’t be happy awake or asleep. Then he would cry like crazy during his nap and the cycle would repeat. We are making the adjustment to cuddle him as part of his awake cycle (maybe 20 minutes tummy time 20 minutes cuddle, but will adjust as necessary), and cuddle him to sleep if he appears to really need it. Since we made that change, he has been eating MUCH better and has slept better also. Once he goes down, he stays down. We’ll see how these adjustments go. Most websites and books mention crying it out when babies are older, but they don’t talk about whether soothing can work at this age. If our new plan doesn’t work, we may adjust again, but I don’t feel confident enough that he is ready to self-soothe completely at this age and I don’t think ultimately it was doing good things for him or us! Who knows, just adding the 20 minutes cuddle time per segment may be all he needed, and then he will put himself to sleep, we’ll see. We have also done 3 days now where Logan’s 9am cycle tummy time is skin-to-skin on daddy’s tummy. This is good for him and he likes it. However, when we are back to work, this may only be accomplished on the weekend, we’ll see.
Overall Charles and I are still slightly tired, but doing pretty well and having fun doing this parenting thing together. We are excited for Maria and Gina to visit next weekend. I hope he squirms a little less so he is easier and more fun for them to hold, but we’ll see. My arthritis is not great, and I am struggling with calming down enough to sleep and getting enough time in bed in general to help it heal.
Happy 3 week birthday to our sweet baby boy! I can’t believe how magical this whole thing has been and I wouldn’t change anything about it (even the sleepless nights). He is so worth it!
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