Since this is a board about newborn naps, I thought maybe i could post a question here too.
Firstly, congrats Tassie for the new addition to your family! I had exactly the same experience as you did - my son was clockwork for 10 days. Every 3 hours you could see him licking his lips and starting to rouse from sleep and getting hungry. I even went to dinner with my family and the baby at a really fancy restaurant and basically fed him and put him back down so easily. It was some consolation given how painful it was to breastfeed him! But after the first ten days he went nuts (woke up!) and I thought, "What the heck?!?!"
Angela is right about being kind to yourself. I was clock watching so much for the first four weeks and I think it contributed to some mild post-partum depression and anxiety. It also made me see my baby as a problem rather than seeing him as who he is and getting to know him. I would agree that it is really important to be compassionate to yourself during the first few weeks, even months. You have plenty of time to put your baby on routine. That's something I'm still having to learn (and my son is only 5 weeks old). The thing with baby books is that they make you feel like if you don't put our baby on a routine in Day 1 then they will end up being the worst babies/kids with major eating/sleeping problems. Also a lot of them make it seem like it's the parent's fault (like they are doing something wrong) if the child does not respond to the routine. I don't think that's true! If all babies really are different (which they are) then surely some will respond and others will not as well. I learned that from a friend whose first baby was on EASY after about 8 weeks, but whose second baby just wanted to be held/nursed/touched all the time so she gave up on the routine and co-slept, demand fed, and he was MUCH happier than when he was on a routine. Two totally different approaches for two siblings.
My experience with EASY and my son is that I really had to pick and choose the things that worked. He is 5 weeks old and does not respond to shh/pat. We're slowly learning to gauge when his cries are just fussy cries (and we can wait before we respond with just patting and sitting next to him) and which ones are distress cries (when we'd respond immediately and pick him up). We couldn't have known what was which unless we experienced his crying and had trial and error. Also, before I would be so adamant about his nap times - if he woke up in the middle of a nap happy and cooing, I would try to force him to go back down (resulting in anxiety on my part and a baby who went from happy to ed off because I was forcing him to do something he didn't need/want to do). That goes against the idea of respecting your child and his needs. I consider it a "successful" EASY day if my son is able to do EASY for like, 75% of the day.
I have a quick question for everyone about naps and night time sleep. My 6-week old is on a relatively (on the good days) stable 2.5-3 hour EASY but his naps are about 2 hours long (E+A is about an hour combined in the mornings). I try to start the day at 7am (give or take 20 minutes) and he is quite sluggish for much of the day - it really is an effort to keep him awake after a feed (though we don't seem to have a problem of him being a snack feeder because I make sure he really gets a full feed). I watch for tiredness cues to put him down for naps and he goes down really easily when I do that. On a good day his routine (based loosely on a combination of EASY and BabyWise) looks something like this:
E+A 7-8am
S 8-10am (I NAP TOO because this nap is generally, uninterrupted - he stirs but doesn't actually wake in the middle)
E+A 10-11am
S 11-12:30pm (I try to hold him out till the 1pm feed if he wakes early; usually he sleeps right up till 1, or just before. Sometimes he will wake 45 min into the nap, but be WIDE awake and happy, in which case I just let him hang out with me and wait to see if he goes back down. If he does, great; if not, I try not to stimulate him too much in the hopes that he will still have some decent A time after the next feed.)
E+A 1-2pm
S 2-4pm
E+A 4-5:30pm (this is when he starts to be able to stay awake for a tad longer after feeds, but he also gets fussy this time of day)
S 5:30-6:45-ish - sometimes this ends up as only a 45 min nap and he sits around watching us. Sometimes this period is meltdown time.
Bath at 6:45 (We try to be very very consistent with the bath, feed, and quiet A time and use that to reset anything that has come before. So for example if he didn't nap at all or didn't nap well, we still try to do the bath at the same time, give or take 20 minutes.)
E+A 7-7:40pm (A is just sitting around watching my husband and I eat dinner); we watch for tiredness cues to put him down so sometimes this E+A can be 30 mins, sometimes it can be an hour and a half.
S till about 10pm
E 10pm (and down for the night)
We start running into trouble in the evening. He is generally a bit fussy after the 4pm feed and the routine can get unpredictable. For the past week, he has been getting really awake after his 10pm feed. Like, WIDE EYED awake - the type of awakeness that I wish he would have during the day so that it would be less of an effort trying to get him to stay awake during his A times in the day! He is _so_ much fun when he is really awake. But we don't want him to be awake at 10pm! He would feed and we would have very little success putting him back down (we've done everything). He seems to go down ok for his middle of the night feeds (usually there are 2 between midnight and 7am, but not at consistent times); sometimes he will fuss at around 6:30am but I try to hold him out till 7am to feed again, especially if he was fed at 5-ish).
I have two questions:
1. Do you think he has day and night mixed up? I try really really hard to get him to wake up for his A time in the day but it is VERY hard to have E+A for more than an hour. I mean, I can wake him up with a bath, but he goes back to sleep 3 minutes after he is dressed. I don't know why he would be so spontaneously awake after the 10pm feed. He also seems to have particular problems with wind at the 10pm feed - three nights in a row we've picked him up after a few minutes of fussing after the feed, and he's let out burps and minor spit-ups. So
2. Do you think he is getting too many hours of naps in the day and that is contributing to his wide awake-ness in the evening? I've tried to stretch his A time but it usually backfires on me; he gets OT and fights the sleep, or he doesn't nap well.
I've done everything I can to try to prevent him mixing up night and day - he naps in the living room in the day where there's a fair amount of light - which doesn't seem to bother him, and in the night he sleeps in his crib in a dark room with a small night light. The majority of the time I am able to feed him in the middle of the night and put him back down with him fussing minimally (unless he had wind or gas) in about 30-40 min.
If anyone has similar experiences or thoughts, please do share!
