In Elle’s 14th week of life, she has become more communicative – both with the noises that she makes to try to talk with you and her facial expressions. Now, we can see when a storm is about to form because her lower lip begins to stick out and quiver. Or we see lots of smiles for purely pleasure’s sake rather than a mirror of our own smiles. These communications get a little more sporadic when she has a 1000 mile stare from not getting enough sleep during the day.
I know some babies don’t sleep during the day and get all their 12-15 hours at night but Elle seems to need daytime sleep…so after Elle was a month or so old we tried to get on a 3 hour cycle of sleep/play/eat. This 3 hour cycle has been mostly aspirational but now with work and a nanny, I am more determined to get that 3 hour cycle going. This blog post is about creating that structure and then the reality of trying to implement the structure.
I based the below structure on a few key concepts: (1) 3-4 month old babies need roughly around 15 hours per sleep per day; (2) flexibility within the structure in the morning is important because the time that Elle wakes up for her morning feed is variable; and (3) overall flexibility is necessary given other constraints (times of work meetings, can’t control the length of Elle’s sleep, being a baby, etc.)
Here’s our rough structure:
5/5:30 Feed, doze and feed again around 7/7:30.
8:30ish-10 Elle sleeps
10 ish Feed
11:30-1 Elle sleeps
1 ish Feed
2ish – 3:30 Elle sleeps
3:30 Feed
5-6:30 Elle sleeps
6:30 Feed
Then Elle maybe sleeps around 8 for another hour or so.
8:30-9:30 Elle feeds again (time dependent on whether Elle takes that last evening nap or not.
The above gets us around 15 hours and it somewhat “worked” for 4 days but then here is what actually happened today:
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| First time "playing" in the water |
3:45 am Elle wakes up. I had
determined to give her a pacifier/soothe her without milk when she wakes up before 5 am but
this morning I didn’t. I didn’t because last night, I felt a
blocked duct in my breast. And I didn’t want that duct
to turn into mastitis again so I just fed her.
6 am Elle wakes up again and I feed her
(because that is the schedule) but she doesn’t eat that much
because she ate a bunch two hours earlier.
7:15-7:45 Elle dozes. Elle won’t
go back to sleep for her “scheduled” 1.5 hour nap
8:30 I give up and feed her again
because I hadn’t fed her that much at 6 am.
8:45 She is a little cranky with the
nanny because she seems tired.
9:15 am we decide to give her a little
more food (even though this is totally OFF her schedule.) The reason
why is that I like to give her a probiotic early in the day to make
sure she drinks all of it. Thus, we give her a little bottle with
probiotic.
Our probiotic of choice is Jarrodophilus – a probiotic that my brother’s pediatrician recommended and our pediatrician approved. I much prefer the Jarrodophilus to the Gerber drops that I had been giving Elle because the drops have only one strain of probiotic whereas the Jarro has 6. Also, we started giving her the Jarro when Elle was having a little bit of bowel issues and those cleared right up. The only bad part about the Jarro is that we have to mix it with my expressed breast milk – we can’t give it to her directly.
9:30 -10:15 Elle snoozes
10:45 While I am on a call for work, the Nanny gives her more food because she seems hungry. And then because the Nanny started, I finish up with a complete feed. Urgh. We burp her and keep her up for a little while.
11:40- 12:45 decent nap. Not 1.5 hours but I will take it. When she wakes up, I think that she will go back to sleep if only I can change her wet dress surreptitiously. (Her dress is all wet because we have been doing “freetime” sleeping.) My efforts at surreptitious dress changing fail and she goes for the breast. I give in to nursing Elle (again off schedule).
1:45 – 3:40 She sleeps again. Close to 2 hours! We are almost back on schedule.
3:40 Feeds
5:15 Elle falls asleep again. 5:45 wakes up and she fitfully dozes for the next hour with her pacifier and beloved snuggle bunny on our bed and with me working on my computer by her side.
6:45 feeds, we hang out and then go for a walk on the beach. We have taken less beach walks then I would like to admit so it was good to get one in.
8:15 Elle feeds
8:45 falls asleep, hopefully for the night.
Counting her
nighttime sleeping from the last night and the fitful dozing complete with smiles, Elle
got roughly 14 or so hours. And for me, my work time in this
haphazard scheduled day? I tried to start reading work stuff on my
computer at 8 am (later than usual because I was working on doing
house stuff before that) and didn’t sign off of work until 9 pm
but yet just barely made 7.5 hours for the day. 11 hours signed
in and only 7.5 hours of work to show for it. Not great.
But even though I didn't get my 8 hours of work and so that aspect of B.A.B.E.dom fell short, I am still planking and I got in a 5.5 mile run at 4 pm after the 3:40 pm feed. Yea for a nanny and work flexibility! Just got get in those 8.5 hours tomorrow...
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