Sleepy time

Our big thing the last couple of weeks with Eliza has been sleep. Specifically, of course, Eliza's sleep.

Naps

As Heather has mentioned previously, Eliza still just plain isn't a very good napper. She has a very strong tendency to wake up after half an hour, no matter how exhausted she might be, and it's a real challenge to get her back to sleep afterward even if she's still clearly tired when she wakes up. She also is not at all able to start or continue a nap in her crib - the only way to get her to nap is to swaddle her, rock her to sleep in her dark room, and then continue to hold her until she wakes up. This was something we just accepted, and mostly embraced while she was younger (especially given that being a preemie tends to lead to more difficulties with sleep - hello NICUitis!) but now that she's getting to be a big girl it's time to start working on this - fewer, longer naps; more time awake between naps; and being able to nap in her crib. The ultimate goal is really just quality sleep that we don't feel she is getting now. Wish us strength - we're gonna need it!

“Why would I want to take a nap? There's so much going on to see and interact with!”

Nighttime sleep

Since we started using the feeding pump for continuous feeds overnight (from about 9 PM to about 5 AM), I don't have to get up at 3 AM to feed her any more. That's great! However, it doesn't always translate into all of us getting to sleep through the night. While Eliza still usually sleeps very soundly once she is asleep, there are three problems:

1) She's having a lot harder time falling asleep at bedtime most nights than she used to. Time was she'd always be passed out completely by the end of her dinnertime feed and it would simply be a matter of laying her in the crib and turning out the light afterward. She still often falls asleep during the feed, but now she tends to wake up when we lay her down in the crib, and it can take an hour or much more to get her back to sleep after that.

2) The feeding pump, oh the feeding pump. It seems to be very sensitive about the consistency of the formula passing through the pump - at seemingly random times, the pump will start beeping and display an alarm about "check for clogs in the line". The beeping won't stop until you go in there and push a button to continue pumping, and there's no way to adjust the sensitivity or disable this alarm. We need to have the monitor volume turned up next to the bed all night so that I can hear the alarm and run to turn it off before the beeping disturbs Eliza (and Heather - night time is my responsibility and she needs her rest after handling baby all day while I'm at work!). Some nights the pump alarm has gone off at fifteen-minute intervals for several hours until we finally got too frustrated with it and simply turned the pump off for the rest of the night. Hoping that the pump was simply defective, we arranged to exchange it with a replacement model, which has helped a little but not completely gotten rid of the alarms. I've also been making an extra effort to ensure that the formula is as thoroughly mixed and blended as possible before feeding it into the pump, and that seems to help somewhat - here's hoping that continues to improve!

3) Eliza is now waking up between 5 and 5:30 AM every morning. She's still sleepy when she wakes up, and can often be soothed back to sleep for an hour or and hour and a half more if we pick her up and continue to hold her. We're not sure why she's waking up (and staying awake!) given that she is still sleepy at that point and that she's still not getting as much total sleep each day as she really ought. Getting her to go back to sleep at that point is essential because if she stays awake from 5 onwards, she can't make it to even 7am (her next scheduled feed), much less 8 AM (when her physical therapist comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays) without being utterly exhausted, and from the books we've been reading she really should be up till at least 8:30 before her next morning nap.

One thing that's been essential since Eliza first came home, and is even more essential as we work on improving her sleeping, is our video baby monitor. It's so helpful to be able to not only hear whether she's fussing or crying, but also to SEE if she's tossing and turning in her sleep, playing quietly instead of napping, or (as has been unfortunately common lately) vomiting her last meal all over herself and her bed. We're not too happy with this particular model (we had to return the first one for a replacement after two months of use, and now we're having to do so again after about three months with this one, but at least it's under warranty!) but the technology itself is absolutely indispensable.

We were going to start working on some "sleep training" tonight to get her to start being able to fall asleep in her crib instead of in our arms, but she "cheated" tonight by passing out before the end of dinner and staying asleep even after I moved her to the crib. Funny baby! We're not complaining about that (!) but it's a bit of a letdown after we psyched ourselves up to start working on this with her. Just goes to show that she's got a mind of her own, our baby!