Day 36: Temperament and sleep

I'm still not done reading Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Dr. Marc Weissbluth, but the book's discussion of infant temperament made me wonder how much Mari's temperament affects her sleep.

The widely accepted measures of infant temperament are as follows (more details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperament#Nine_Temperament_Characteristics_of_Thomas_and_Chess):

Activity (General motion and energy):  Mari is pretty squirmy, always has been. Even when she's on her back she's always kicking and flailing in a jerky way. Though she's not yet creeping or crawling, I would put her activity level at fairly high.

Rhythmicity (Regularity of bodily functions): Mari is definitely not regular or predictable. Today was a fairly good day -- she napped regularly and was pretty happy and energetic. But I swear, I didn't do anything differently than I did yesterday, when she hardly napped at all. I can never predict when she'll nap or for how long, when she'll poo, how much she'll eat, etc.

Approach/Withdrawal (first reaction): Hmm, I'm not sure on this one. Mari has some pretty fierce stranger aversion, so she's definitely withdrawing when it comes to people. But she's not necessarily fearful of new places, experiences or tastes, as long as we're with her.

Intensity: Mari is very intense. When she's happy she's ecstatic. When she's unhappy she screams like a dying jet engine. She can careen between the two in less than a second.

Mood: Not sure I get this one. Mari's moods vary a lot, but don't most babies' moods vary? When she's well-rested she's generally cheerful. When she's not she's fussy. So I suppose she's somewhere in the middle of the scale.


Persistence: Mari is very persistent, for better and for worse. When she was learning to roll over or to sit up it was all she wanted to do for days. She can also be extremely persistent in crying and resisting sleep even when she's tired.

Distractibility: Mari is quite distractible, though she's not on the extreme end of the scale. She's very easily distracted by unusual or new sights, noises, and toys. Picking her up can distract her from fussing quickly, but it doesn't last. Same goes for novel soothing techniques -- they seem to work quickly at first, but she goes back to fussing quickly.


Threshold (sensitivity): Mari is very sensitive, especially to noises. She's easily startled by even not-so-loud noises such as a wooden block falling into a small box. Truly loud noises such as the sound of the vacuum make her howl. When she's sleeping she's very easily awakened even by tiny sounds such as the rustle of paper or the crinkle of plastic.

According to the book, intense babies also tend to be slowly adaptable, negative in mood and withdrawn. These traits make for a "difficult" temperament. Well, I'd say Mari is very intense but in the middle on the other supposedly related measures. So I suppose she has an "intermediate" temperament by the book's classification system. But Weissbluth also notes babies who are highly active and highly sensitive are also at risk of sleep problems, especially when routines are disrupted. This is obviously true for Mari. So despite her natural lack of regularity she really needs me to try my best to impose a routine and a schedule. Too bad it's so hard.

There are other ways of measuring temperament. According to The Baby Whisperer, Mari is "spirited" -- a baby who knows what she wants and doesn't want and doesn't hesitate to let people know, and loudly. (An abbreviated version of the quiz in the book is available here: http://quiz.ivillage.com/parenting/tests/knowyourbaby.htm)

Mari is also a "high needs" baby according to Dr. William Sears, the guru of attachment parenting. She fits all 12 of the characteristics listed here <http://www.askdrsears.com/html/5/T050400.asp> to a tee.

All this adds up to Mari not being hard-wired to sleep well. Dr. Sears has a good article about it here: http://www.askdrsears.com/html/5/T050900.asp. So I suppose sleep will always be somewhat of a struggle. Still, the changes I've made so far have made a world of difference, though I clearly still need to do more work on trying to get her to fall asleep on her own, especially for naps, since I'm still having difficulty putting her down before the very-nearly-asleep stage.

Day 9: To co-sleep or not to co-sleep?

Before Mari was born, here's how I imagined things: she would sleep in her Arm's Reach co-sleeper bassinet until she started getting too big for it. It would be good for both of us to have her there as a young baby because she'd need to nurse at night.  I'd nurse her in bed, put her back in her co-sleeper and we'd both sleep until the next time she needed to nurse. Then, once she started getting too big for her co-sleeper, perhaps around four months or so, she would easily transition to her crib because by then she'd be big enough not too need to nurse at night.

The reality looked more like this: I would put the younger Mari in her co-sleeper at the beginning of the night, but once she got onto the boob and started nursing, I'd drift off and wouldn't put her back in the co-sleeper. An hour or so later, I'd wake up uncomfortable because I'd be holding my shoulder in a weird position over her head. So I'd try to put her in her co-sleeper at that point. Often, she'd wake up, and I'd wind up putting her back in our bed again to comfort her. So she got used to being in our bed and came to prefer it. So she slept less in her co-sleeper and not at all in her crib until recently.

Now Mari is really too big for the co-sleeper. She can still fit in it -- just -- but her arms touch the sides when she flings them out, and sometimes that wakes her up. She still seems to prefer being in our bed. She wakes up less often that way. But sometimes it's clear that a movement or sound of mine wakes her up. More often, a movement or sound of hers wakes me up, and my shoulders feel permanently kinked from holding my arms above her head.

I think there are good reasons to co-sleep. I do think more cuddling helps parents and baby bond, and helps the baby feel secure. As I said, Mari does tend to wake up less often when she's sleeping with us. It is indeed easier to nurse and comfort her when she's right beside me.

However, I don't want to co-sleep with Mari forever. I think it's interfering with her learning to fall asleep and stay asleep on her own. It definitely isn't good for Jon's sleep (never mind our sex life), and it's debatable what it does for mine. I do spend more time more fully awake if I have to go to her at night when she's sleeping in her crib down the hall. However, I am less often awakened by little snorts and movements in her sleep. 

Since there seem to be more pros to getting her to sleep in her crib, I've been working on keeping her in her crib longer at night. Once I get sick of tromping down the hall in the middle of the night, I bring her into bed with me. I co-sleep with her at naptime if I also want a nap, or if she's overtired and really fussy and is having difficulty calming down enough to nap.

Sometimes do I wonder if I'm striking the right balance. There's no shortage of experts on one hand telling me that co-sleeping is best to have a close attachment to my baby, or on the other hand telling me that I should have made her sleep in her crib from day one and cry it out when she wakes up. I don't know the right answer -- I'm just doing what feels right at the moment. I do hope she spends full nights in her crib soon, but I make a point of doing a lot of cuddling during the day and I put her in her sling for outings whenever practical.

Today: It was a bad day for keeping on the schedule. She woke up later than usual, so I let her go for her morning nap later, and that nap turned out to be a long one. Then I took her shopping, which took longer than I expected, so she had a late and short early-afternoon nap, followed by a very late late-afternoon nap. Still, I have had some success this evening: a couple of times, she fussed in her sleep, I waited, and she put herself back to sleep.

Mari's sleep results

I spent yesterday logging when Mari napped, our pre-bedtime routine and her night wakings. The result: 11 night wakings. Yes, eleven. Now you know why I'm so tired.

It may have even been a slightly better than usual day. Though I haven't yet started the formal new sleep plan, I was already following some of the suggestions from the No-Cry Sleep Solution, and put her to bed earlier than usual. In total, she slept 8 hours 50 minutes at night. The book says she should be getting 10 or 11.

Her longest sleep stretch was 2 hours and 45 minutes, probably the longest she's had in weeks – I don't think she's slept more than two hours at a stretch since the new year. Her shortest, after appearing to be genuinely asleep enough for me to relax and log the previous sleep stretch, was five minutes.

Her longest awake stretch was 30 minutes, which is better than usual. Some days she's up for an hour or an hour and a half before dawn, before she goes to sleep again. But 11 wakings of 5-30 minutes each means I'm really not getting much sleep, especially considering it takes me longer to get to sleep than she does.

It wasn't a good day for naps either. In fact, the short naps were why I put her to bed earlier than usual. Her three naps totalled only 2 hours and 35 minutes, a far cry from the 5-6 hours the book says she should be getting at this age.

In total, Mari slept 11 hours, 25 minutes. She should be getting 14 or 15 hours of sleep. It's clear something has to change.

Tomorrow: the plan.