Emmeline's sleep has something of a focus in our household recently. Her nap schedule during the day is a little variable, but she tends to catnap a little in the morning and afternoon with one big four-hour nap in the middle of the day. I don't think it's the best thing for her, but it's clearly her tendency, and so right now we're going with it. At night, except for one magical night when she went to bed around 7pm, she doesn't usually fall asleep until around 10pm, often because I go with her, nurse her and snuggle her, and then move her to the co-sleeper once she's down. Right before I left for Savannah, we'd gotten a swing and used it to help settle her at night. She'd started sleeping most the night in her crib, and we were both getting better sleep. But the travel and then the surgery threw all that off, and now the swing -- while it helps -- doesn't get her down at night. Wes and I have both had turns recently of sitting with her on and off for several hours in the evening, trying to get her fully asleep somewhere other than in our arms. I get a lot of good television watched that way, but not so much school or housework, let alone dealing with Oliver if I'm home alone.
What does help sometimes, though not all the time, is swaddling her once she's tired and recently changed, then nursing her, then rocking her with her pacifier before putting her down. She gets kind of crazy with her squirming recently, so it seems to help to control them in a swaddle. The only problem being, she seems to be able to get out of almost any swaddle I can do. Last night, she fell asleep in my arms after an hour or more of fussing on and off. I laid her down in her crib, and she slept maybe 20-30 minutes. So I changed her, swaddled her, nursed her, and laid her down again while she was still awake but sleepy. That lasted about the same amount of time. She was then up for several more hours, fussing on and off, nursing once or twice. I tried the swing at least twice, but it didn't seem to help. I finally picked her up from the swing about 10pm, and with a little swaying, she fell to sleep, slept until 1am, when she got changed, nursed, and slept until 6am.
Ollie was usually an easy baby to get to sleep. He would cluster feed almost nonstop for about an hour, but then pass out and be down. No rocking, no swaying, no swing, no swaddling. But, despite some early successes, he didn't sleep more than three hours at a go until seven months or later. He was eight or nine months before he truly slept through the night, and that didn't become a pattern until ten or eleven months. I didn't mind because it was easy to get up just once, nurse, and go back to sleep. With Emme right now, though, it's sometimes three or four hours to get her to sleep, and she's usually up for the day eight or so hours later, which means six or seven hours of sleep for me and not continuous. I have to say, I'm getting a little tired. She has had stretches of five and six hours, though, which helps keep me from really, really tired. I'm hopeful that once we can get her bedtime routine worked out, she might sleep through sooner than Oliver did.
Fortunately for me, I'm leaving for a conference on Friday, where I will be, alone in a hotel room each night, until Tuesday. That's four -- FOUR -- nights of sleep. And maybe even a nap. I doubt I can get more than six hours of continuous sleep without waking up because I need to pump, but even that's not bad. I feel a little bad for Wes, who will be dealing with this by himself, but then I realize that usually I deal with it by myself and I feel less bad. I'm most worried about Emme, who is sometimes only consoled by a nursing mommy who snuggles her into bed. Wes is a much heavier sleeper, much more likely to smother her, and so less likely to let her snuggle next to him to go to sleep. Of course, that may be just what we all need to get her into a routine.
