My poor daughter. She gets schlepped everywhere. Plucked out of bed some mornings for preschool drop-off, with nary a nursing or a diaper change. Then either some appointment I have or preschool pick-up interferes with a nap in the afternoon. I haven’t even tried a mommy and me yoga class or anything for fear of messing with her even more. I’ve started a log to figure out what her natural rhythm might be so that I can try to honor it, but it’s still a moving target, especially when I have some event I just have to go to…
Her brother was mo
re challenging, but because of that, he felt more portable, at least at night. He didn’t want to be set down, so if I had an evening La Leche League meeting, he just came along. I thought it was weird when mothers with babies were out without them for more than an hour or so.
But this girl — three and a half months now — would certainly like to just be set down in a dark room rather than out in bright lights while her mom leads a meeting. But then again, when I went to an event two nights earlier, I was sure she’d be zonked for hours, but she woke and would only stop if my husband had her in the sling. So off to Holistic Moms she went to avoid a repeat performance.
Today her dad is going to take her brother out in the morning, and I’m not sure how she’ll handle just staying home with no car ride to start her morning nap. When her brother was this age, Elizabeth Pantley hadn’t yet published her No-Cry Nap Solution book. We used the No-Cry Sleep Solution quite a bit, and my husband even got on an email list for people following its recommendations for nighttime sleep.
For naps, I just usually took them with him, and that worked until I caught up and he got used to sleeping alone. The second time around, that’s a luxury we don’t have. I could use some help figuring out how to establish good, healthy nap habits. Big brother was d.o.n.e. napping by two and a half, which was rough. It looks from the tips in Pantley’s newsletter that he was probably ready to be done, but I wasn’t!
I think it’s time for us to check out the rest of the expanded Pantley library of no-cry books, especially now that she’s got a discipline book, and we finally have on our hands a boy whose antics stump us! And for the baby girl, I just might want to use some of the logs that are available for download to get my act in gear. The official website is http://www.nocrysolution.com. She’s currently running a contest to win her whole library if you mention one of her books on your blog, website or e-newsletter.
Hey Jessica–I cannot recommend “The 90-Minute Baby Sleep Program: Follow Your Child’s Natural Sleep Rhythms for Better Nights and Naps” highly enough! It’s a pretty simple concept, but it helps determine when your baby’s best window for sleep is. Worked great for Eliza (I didn’t have it for Quinn.) Good luck!
Thanks! I will check it out! It’s 11:30, and she’s been asleep for over two hours happily in bed. Thought she was going to wake twice but then she quieted right back down. If I could teleport her brother to preschool, maybe she’d do this every day!