At Sea on a Sine Wave
Did I say something about progress in the life of a new family being like a complicated dance? Lately it has been more of a sine curve – perhaps one of those barely intelligible squiggles drawn by a preschooler. There have been some highs and lows, lots of trudging uphill and sliding back down, and very little idea as to which way we’re headed.
Shortly after my last posting, which I see is five weeks ago now, Liam suddenly began to sleep peacefully (in his own bed) from the 9:00pm feeding until somewhere between 3 and 5, at which point he guzzled a quiet bottle and went right back for another four hours of the dreamless (in his own bed). Needless to say, there was much amazed rejoicing in our household. I had not had it so good in about a year. I was sleeping more than I was when I was pregnant.
Then we did a bit of traveling over the course of the following three weeks, and the volcano erupted. I have always maintained what might be termed an “anticipation/reaction” style of parenting, letting Liam tell me when he was ready to eat and when he needed to sleep. This works great if you don’t leave your house. But when the surroundings are different, Baby doesn’t know what he needs; and it is not always easy to coax him using the logical “if you were at home, you would want to do X, so we’re going to do X now.” Babies are not known for their ratiocination.
So he got overtired, and we made one or two trips too many, and what routine we had went out the window. That was a rough couple of weeks, because Liam fussed and would not sleep, and I felt like I no longer knew how to read him. As long as we had to figure out an entirely new routine anyway, we decided that we would try to break him of his habit of sleeping upright in his swing. He had shown a propensity for a longer afternoon nap, so we started feeding him a larger bottle beforehand and then putting him in his bed. That did work a couple of times, so we thought we were getting somewhere. Only, the bottom dropped out, and then he refused to sleep much at all during the day, let alone go down for consistent naps. We tried everything – feeding him larger portions, feeding him more frequently, laying him down, sitting him up… The end result is that despite all our efforts, he sleeps in his swing during the day and still refuses to go more than one sleep cycle at a time. As soon as he hits light sleep again, the eyes pop open.
Meanwhile, we were proudly implementing a consistent bedtime routine, complete with consistent bedtime cues that sent the message, “Sleep is good, sleep is now.” And he loved his bedtime. We would turn on the lullabies, turn the nursery lamp to low, sit down with him the glider, and within a couple of minutes his eyelids would droop. Down he went into his little basket, “drowsy but awake,” and that was that. He had even been known to go straight to sleep without the pacifier once or twice, so relieved was he to be put to bed.
We should have known, of course, that this was where the mudslide would begin to sweep us downhill. Bedtime was the one and only consistency in Liam’s day, and we worked hard to keep it that way. Then, without warning, he began waking up twice or more during the night. Let me tell you, to go from one nightly twenty-minute interruption to my sleep (I had stopped pumping during the middle of the night, by the way), to two drawn-out, forty-minute sessions of feeding and fussing and soothing, was a pretty rude awakening. I was not in the least happy about it. So we began messing with bedtime, trying to find something that worked. He was waking consistently at two and six – and, little rooster that he is, he is always determined to get up and party if he wakes up any time after 5am. So we tried pushing the whole bedtime routine to a later hour. That was no good, because he would pretty much keel over at around 7pm, but refused to simply take another nap then. We had a very tired baby on our hands.
Our current practice is to put him down at 7, then wake him up, if he does not wake on his own, and feed him a large bottle when we go to bed, around 10pm. The problem now is that he still wakes at 2am, utterly convinced that he should eat. I happen to like this business of getting up at 6, because we can both eat, I can pump his next meals, and then we go back to bed together for a (usually short) nap. I dig the early bedtime, too, because Damian and I can actually have an evening together, and know that I can get a workout in after Liam goes down if I want. But I am not at all cool with this middle of the night business, when we all know that he doesn’t need that extra food. In fact, he is getting way too much to eat on the current system.
That is not his only sleeping problem, either. Did I mention that I hate pacifiers? In our house, it is known as a “ptooey,” and it is proving to be just the pesky monster that I knew it would. We initially gave it to Liam because I cannot give him suckling time at the breast, and he has an inordinate need to suck. Correction, we gave it to him because giving him my thumb or finger – his pacifier of choice – was causing painful, arthritis-like swelling in my hands. We transitioned him to the ptooey so that I would be able to pick the little guy up. He has become more and more dependent on it, and we have found ourselves doing just what every parent has sworn they would never do: scrambling for it in the dark of the night to pop it back in his mouth.
This dark-of-the-night business, obviously, has developed since the termination of that blissful period when he was only waking once. It is getting worse and worse lately, and I swear that the baby-stoppering exercise is now up to a count of about twenty-five times a night. He seems to have become very insecure recently. Perhaps the very mild cold he is fighting has something to do with it. At any rate, nowadays, even with the pacifier in his mouth, you hear that unhappy, whiny grunt whine several times a night. Magically, if you pull him into our bed with us, it stops. The only problem I have with his being in our bed at night is that I can’t move freely, and that gets old. Still, sharing a family bed is the last thing I am concerned about at the moment.
What bothers me most about the ptooey, besides losing a LOT of sleep because of it lately, is that it seems to be teaching Liam to not bother with his hands. He discovered them about two weeks ago, and he thinks they’re just fine things to bring along with you in life. His actions with them are more deliberate now, although not always entirely conscious. However, smacking on them is regarded as a leisure activity, and when it is time for sleep, we want to get down to some serious sucking. For that, we need something that fits the shape of the mouth better – say, an adult-sized thumb, or, hey, a ptooey will work nicely. He is now to the stage where he can reach up and unintentionally (and repeatedly) jerk the ptooey out of his mouth, which leads to some frustrating nap- and bedtime sessions for both baby and parent. We got him a different pacifier, without that stupid little ring that flops around and makes noise. This one fits the curve of his face better, making it more difficult for a small thumb to sneak in behind it and pop it out of the oral socket. The good news is, it is a better pacifier. The bad news is, it is a better pacifier. It really bothers me to see him reaching up with his hands and not being able to get them into his mouth because there is a ptooey in the way. That is not sending the message I want him to receive. I notice that he is not even munching on the fingers as much, so more and more sucking time is spent with the pacifier.
In short, I am completely fed up, and now that I know he can get some sucking satisfaction from his hands, I am ready to try to break this habit. I started yesterday. When it is time for a little sleep – and, mind you, it usually is that time, since all he will do is catnap – I bounce him, rock him, sing to him, walk him around, offer the satin binding of his lovey, maneuver his hands into an accessible position… Anything but give him the ptooey. In the middle of the night I gave it to him, because I knew I would rather not immediately wage a 24-hour Anti-Ptooey War, otherwise known as going cold turkey, when it is going to cut into my sleep even more than it already does. Liam was accidentally awakened at 4am, and I don’t think any of us slept much after that. I believe that inside of two hours, I put the dreadful item back in his mouth 18 times out of the usual twenty-five-per-night.
It is going to be a long week or so, but I am convinced I am doing the right thing. I am happy to offer myself in the night if that is what he needs, but having everyone wake up because an artificial prop fell out of his mouth is just not going to continue to be an option. Around six months or so, they say that he should be able to find his own ptooey in the dark of the night. Well, if that’s the case, he can certainly find his own thumb, so that leaves us with two months to help him decide that the thumb is the preferable item. We know he can find those hands when he wants them; we just have to convince him that he does want them. The younger he is, the shorter his memory, so we may as well do this now. It is a hard row to hoe – and I do feel like I have been bending over in the dirt, from all this carting him around in my arms trying to comfort him – but it needs to be done.
At least, that’s what I thought until this afternoon, when I realized the complexity of another little problem we’re facing. I have already mentioned – haven’t I? – that Liam is allergic to cow’s milk formula, so we switched to a soy base. When I took Liam to the doctor last week, I mentioned that he is only pooping once or twice in a 24-hour period. Granted, those poops are often large and explosive, the kind that coat the inside of his pants. If dirtying a diaper were something taught to newborns by older, more experienced babies, my son would be the rogue professor who throws away the book. “Forget that six-plus dirty diapers a day that the experts tell you to aim for. What you do, is you save it all up and give a couple of good blow-outs. That way you get to rotate through your entire wardrobe within a few days.” The doctor’s conclusion, bolstered by my additional news that there is still some mucous in his diapers, is that Liam is having a difficult time digesting the soy protein, a fairly common malady among allergy-prone children.
We switched formulas again, to a protein hydrolysate formula. Designed for children with allergies and reflux problems, this is supposed to be the easiest stuff on the market for them to digest. It is, however, made from cow’s milk, even if the protein is already broken down. I am noticing the same rash on Liam’s face and bottom that we saw the first time we dealt with his milk allergy. So far, (especially for a baby who does not sleep much) he is not particularly fussy. But this afternoon, as I spent about forty minutes trying to sooth him to sleep without the ptooey, I wondered… Is this increasing fussiness over the last several hours simply fatigue on top of ptooey-withdrawal, a necessary crag on the rocky road to thumb sucking? Or is it increasing intolerance of the new formula, and have I taken away a major source of comfort just when my baby needs it most?
The doctor suggests that we give it a couple more days, until the end of the week, and then check in with her. We have switched to a different brand of protein hydrolysate formula. It is theoretically the same stuff, but it could potentially affect him differently. After that, the doc has no choice but to refer us to an immunologist. I am pumping three times a day and making about 60-75% of what Liam is eating, which is a lot; but it is not as though I can find a way to eliminate formula entirely, unless I vow not to sleep. I suppose I had better give the ptooey back for now, to keep only one variable in my data so as to better gauge the cause of his fussiness… and to assuage my guilty mother’s conscience, so that I do not always look back and wonder if I did a mean and nasty thing just at the time when it would make life hardest for my child. We can always declare war some other day.
I have, astonishingly, been able to write this much in one sitting, because when I finally got Liam to sleep, I cheated: I turned the swing on. The hope, justified this time, at least, was that the gently soothing motion would help him through more than one sleep cycle. It has been a rough day for both of us, and he needs the sleep. Poor guy. He is riding the sine wave with us, and getting soaked in sea brine. No doubt all of these issues are the result of the deep trauma of those early days of being denied the breast. Freud would certainly think so. The allergies are physical enough, but they would have been far less likely if I could have been the breastfeeding mother I intended to be.
Well, these are the cards we have been handed. Deal.
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