A Few Thoughts on Sleep

Advice on the sleep of infants - how to induce it, particularly - is a topic that is of relative usefulness. By "relative" I mean some of it is helpful for some babies some of the time. Which words of wisdom may be relevant to your child at any particular developmental point is kind of anyone's guess since so much of what is written is wildly varied and often entirely contradictory to other pieces of advice. So, advice is perhaps something best avoided for parents on this subject. Yet questions about how your baby is sleeping are some of the first questions that come pouring forth from friends and family.

We are fortunate enough to have a fairly restful baby (at night anyway), but I still find the questions a little irritating. For one thing, when people ask how long she slept the night before, and I say a four to five hour chunk of sleep and then about an hour to two hours after being fed, some people balk as if that's not a great bit of sleep. It IS, folks! God, the first week of sleeping only an hour at a time was like some kind of torture. This is amazing! I'm trying to enjoy this because at any given moment, she could go back to sleeping in only little two hour stretches...or less! For some reason, the constant focus on "when will baby sleep through the night" is irksome. Realistically, infants and small children just sleep differently than adults...I am trying to just accept that. I guess I don't like resisting that fact...and, I don't know, imagining it is going to be wildly different soon. So, I'm not crazy about people reminding me that I'm NOT sleeping, say a solid 8 hours.

There are helpful tips, though. For instance, the oft given advice "sleep when your baby sleeps" is generally helpful. In fact, we could just say, when you become a parent, become a napper. Even a "night napper" as Kiyomi calls the style of sleep you get at night with a baby. When I can nap with Ila during the day for at least one stretch, I feel much better. That being said, trying to nap at the same time as your infant can be an exercise in torture. Once you are awake for the day, you've adjusted to a certain degree of tiredness. That is, you're resigned to being vertical and conscious. With this resignation comes a degree of comfort, at least you're not in that half-state of trying to wake up. As soon as you lay down to nap, you lower these defenses...and become very, very sleepy. If your child actually naps for a while - GREAT, you also get some sleep. If your child naps for twenty minutes...well, you will have to go through that miserable process of adjusting to being upright and awake all over again. If you can have a partner take care of the truant napper in case they run out on the sleeping session, then it works well. However, that means your partner has to drop whatever they are doing.

This week Ila is sleeping for what feels like tiny bits of time during the day...and longer at night. I try to focus on the "longer at night" bit of that statement. However, I wonder if this micro-sleeping is going to extend to the night soon. Should I look at what the books say? I think we know the answer to that...but just for fun! One book tells me that this is normal because, as she gets older, she will be more wakeful. Another book says if she's not sleeping enough during the day, she won't sleep for long at night. A third book - the one I'd like to believe - says that babies that are fed often on cue rather than a schedule and are held most of the time are more likely to cat nap during the day and sleep for longer stretches at night. God in heaven, please let this be the case. I'm just going to keep going by her cues...trying to get her to sleep when she's sleepy...and hoping that this is enough. Hopefully it will keep going well. Whichever way it goes, though, I promise to not give anyone any kind of advice based on it. Really. I promise.