Wake-to-sleep videos?

[b0nni3]

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone has any videos of Wake-to-sleep successes? I've been trying for the past few days (the one where you stir them a couple minutes before they stir naturally) and my LO has just woken up anyway. The 2nd and 3rd nap of the day are consistently short (45 mins) even though my LO still looks tired when he wakes up but won't go back down (resulting in a couple of cat naps in the afternoon). I've also tried pressure at the jolts but I think by the time he is jolting he will definitely wake up, so I didn't pursue that.

I don't seem to be able to gauge the rhythm of wake-to-sleep so I'd sort of like to see it done properly...does anyone have any videos they could post?

Thanks!
Bonnie

[deckchariot]

I do not have a video of doing w2s, but I have done it, and it did work.  How old is your bub?  Often, 45 min naps can be helped by a bit of a routine tweak, so I'm wondering first if you could post your EASY routine and we can start by looking at that....

When I did w2s, I started by just going in her room about 15 min before I thought she would wake, and watching what happened when she woke up - so I would know.  Then, when I saw her start to wake, I'd put my hands on her arms and legs to "hold" her.  If she continued waking, I'd start shhhhhing....if she continued waking, I'd start patting too.....if she woke all the way, I'd do pu/pd or pat/shh to get her back to sleep.  I did it for 2 weeks - every nap, and had success maybe 50% of the time, but that was enough for her to figure it out.  So it is a bit of a guessing game to get it right, but my experience was that I didn't need to get it right every time to still have it work.

hth
michelle

[b0nni3]

I follow a rough 3 to 3.5 hourly easy, and follow tiredness cues so putting him down for naps has never been a problem - he just goes down in about 3 minutes once put in his crib. The only problem is getting him to stay down after 45 mins! I've spent many a whole 45 mins shh/patting him back to sleep only to squeeze in 15 mins of extra sleep before the next feed. Sometimes he is just wide awake and very happy (smiles and laughs at me while I shh/pat, cheeky monkey!) so if that's the case I don't try to make him go back to sleep.

LO is 12 weeks old tomorrow. A times range from 1 hr 20 mins to 1 hr 40 mins. I follow tiredness cues so I don't try too hard to stretch or shorten these - he seems to have a pretty good rhythm that makes it really really easy to put him down for naps. Once he's tired, he's tired, and he will sleep. Just not for longer than 45 mins!

I've tried tweaking the routine, but since I follow tiredness cues and he never fights when put down for naps, I don't know how else to tweak it. I've tried to make him go down earlier - only to find him awake and happy in his cot, and then drift off to sleep at the time he would normally fall asleep anyway. I've tried lengthening his A times a bit, but most of the time that's impossible - if I leave him in his bouncy chair for "chill awake time", he will fall asleep in the chair or even under the play gym if I just let him lie there! If I engage with him then he just gets cranky and looks at me like "why aren't you putting me in my bed? I'm tired!!"

Routine is roughly as follows. For the past few days he has woken up early around 5 or 6 which has been annoying. (especially when he managed to STTN - 11pm till about 7am - for four nights from last Mon to last Thur, sigh.). I'd give or take 30 minutes to this routine depending on the day and how much sleep I got. So some days we'd start the day a little later, but always between 7 and 8am. (If it's before 7am I treat it as night time.)

7am WAKE/FEED/A for 1.5 hours
8:30am NAP (most of the time this nap is great, and is 1.5 to 2 hours long. I wake him if he goes beyond 2 hours.)
10 or 10:30am E/A for 1.5 hours
11:30-12 noon START NAP (Nap is 45 mins, sometimes he will resettle after a 30 minute period of being wide awake and nap for another 45 mins, so hopefully this nap time totals 1.5 hours even if there is a break in between)
1:30-2pm WAKE from nap, E+A
3:15 ish NAP (this one is almost always 45 mins, have had NO success extending it except if we were out in town and he was in the buggy, MAYBE he would sleep longer)
From this point on it's flexible since naps are sufficiently messed up, so I just follow cues.
4:30-5pm ish FEED + A time
Around 6, 6:15 ish he goes down for another 45 min nap.
7pm WAKE + play with Daddy
7:45 bath
8pm FEED + quiet a time (hang out with us, then a quiet story and a song then bed)
8:30/9pm bed
10:30/11pm FEED
For four nights last week he went from this feed right up until 7am in the morning. But for the past few nights he has woken up at around 4am so I feed him and put him back down...and then at 6am he would wake!! I'm not quite sure what's going on. I am giving the night feeds a whole week to see if it's a growth spurt. I know LOs at this age often still have that middle of the night feed, but since my LO has shown, for 4 nights straight, that he can manage without it, I'm hoping to cut it out again if he's ready to. So we'll see.

As for W2S, I've observed a couple of naps now and basically at around 40 minute mark he would stir once, settle for 2 minutes, and then suddenly stir a LOT and then wake up. Once he starts kicking his legs in a certain way I could be sure that he would wake up. So I tried stirring him before the 40 min mark, once or twice with about 2 mins gap in between, and he wouldn't stir. Then at 40 min he stirred, and then woke several minutes later.

Any help with W2S would be appreciated! I just want to see how it's done...I'm not persistent enough to sit at home for an entire week just to get his naps nailed down...it will just drive me crazy being stuck at home all the time. I know there is no easy fix, but I think if I could observe someone do it and explain to me at which point they are being brought out of deep sleep and at which point they go into light sleep, maybe I could get a better sense of it.

[b0nni3]

p.s. actually in hindsight his first morning naps (the one that starts 1.5 hrs after the day first starts) have almost always (5 times out of 7 in the past week) been longer than 1.5 hours. This morning i decided not to wake him and he wwoke at the 2 hour mark on the dot, naturally. he saw me (I wad watching him) and smiled! this is not how he normally wakes up from the other naps!!

[deckchariot]

it looks like you've got a really good handle on your lo's routine and cues, so that's great!!!  Since it really does seem to be on the dot 45 min waking, I suspect it's not a routine issue (your routine looks pretty good - though I might try to move that bedtime earlier - most bubs work best on a 12 hr day/night routine)

It's really, really common for bubs to have trouble transitioning through the jolts at this age.  And I'm not sure that watching others do it would be all that helpful - since the way each bub stirs and wakes is different, as is the amount of holding and/or stirring it takes to make w2s successful.  I found that it really was trial and error - I'd try a tug on the swaddle, and that wouldn't be enough, I'd try pulling her thumb out of her mouth and that was too much....so I just kept trying different levels of stirring, and I never really had any success with that, which is why I switched to trying to hold her through the jolts - and even that, like I said, only worked about 50% of the time, but that did seem to be enough.  So I would say that you may just need to do a little experimenting to figure out what will work best for you lo too - they are really all so different.

The more consistent you can be doing w2s, the better success you'll have with it.  And the way I looked at it, I'd be home during her naps anyway, so why not put off housework or other Y stuff for a bit to work on getting better naps, because then in the long run, I got more Y time than if she was taking short naps. 

Also, I'd not wake him from that first nap unless it goes past 2 hrs - letting him wake on his own may actually help him manage his sleep cycles better - it's possible that he could get used to being awoken, and that could backfire when you do w2s.

Here's a couple links that might be helpful (you may have already looked at them):
http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=649.0
http://babywhispererforums.com/index.php?topic=64168.0

hth
michelle