I can't emphasize enough to you the dark that is the first two weeks of a newborn's life at night. During the day, it's all cuddles. When there was a diaper change, my husband or I would say, "Oh, look: a poopy diaper! What a healthy girl we have (*kiss*)." At 4 a.m., though, neither of us spoke past a sort of whimpering. With red eyes and sore bosoms (mine, not Tim's--more on that later), I thought, "This baby is going to kill us." Talk about LOW. We'd wake up the next morning, not having slept but a few sporadic hours, exhausted only to have to do it all over again. The worst part is some other parents told us tales of sleepless nights lasting until a child was two or older. Would this cycle of screaming, eating, & diaper changing go on for another two years? That thought alone made me cry.
All day I kept my parenting books strapped to my heart as I desperately searched for a way to make Rain sleep. I read technique after technique, but none of them seemed quite right for our particular kid. All the while, we kept at least one thing certain: during the day, Rain would stay in a lit room, and at night, we turned off the lights. This may seem trivial, but a lot of parents cart their babies off to a dark, silent room for naps. My sister, however, had instructed me to let Rain nap (which didn't happen much or for long) in a lit room (I always tried to use natural lighting plus a lamp) with an average noise level (no silent cells). Somehow we hoped this would teach the baby the difference between night and day. It was our only hope, since the last book we read kept pushing a 3-hour cycle (eat, play, sleep) which totally failed with Rain (who demanded food every 2 hours).
One night during the second week, I awoke to Rain's crying. I checked the clock, something I do often now: she had slept almost 4 hours straight! As pitiful as this minor success would seem to non-parents, to me it was a nugget of pure gold in an endless mine of nightly despair.
All day I kept my parenting books strapped to my heart as I desperately searched for a way to make Rain sleep. I read technique after technique, but none of them seemed quite right for our particular kid. All the while, we kept at least one thing certain: during the day, Rain would stay in a lit room, and at night, we turned off the lights. This may seem trivial, but a lot of parents cart their babies off to a dark, silent room for naps. My sister, however, had instructed me to let Rain nap (which didn't happen much or for long) in a lit room (I always tried to use natural lighting plus a lamp) with an average noise level (no silent cells). Somehow we hoped this would teach the baby the difference between night and day. It was our only hope, since the last book we read kept pushing a 3-hour cycle (eat, play, sleep) which totally failed with Rain (who demanded food every 2 hours).
One night during the second week, I awoke to Rain's crying. I checked the clock, something I do often now: she had slept almost 4 hours straight! As pitiful as this minor success would seem to non-parents, to me it was a nugget of pure gold in an endless mine of nightly despair.
1 comment:
Parenting books should have a warning clearly stamped on the front cover saying, "Use only as a guide. Babies have minds of their own."
Glad the tip worked.. mom passed it on to me when I had my little one.
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