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Babies: 6 - 9 Months
JJ1973
member
the crib is a stimulant...please help
JJ1973
member
My LO (6 months), when sleepy, gets completely jazzed up the moment I put him in the crib. I am slowly going crazy and am sobbing right now after spending two hours trying to put him down for a nap. He gets sleepy, I put him in, he becomes more alert and smiley, starts rolling around and vocalizing. I try to calm/sooth him (or not, I've also tried ignoring this - I sit in the rocker and read to see what he will do, and I've tried leaving the room...I feel like I've tried almost everything). The room is darkened. He just works himself up to fussiness. That ends up in my holding him and trying to rock him. He doesn't like that, so I put him back in the crib. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. It is such a bad routine. It all results in him being overtired and even more fussy the next nap (or no nap, as the case may be). Today, I was at the end of my rope, so I let him cry for a minute or two. I couldn't handle it and went back in. He so obviously needs to nap and he is so tired. I really don't know what to do. I've read the No Cry Sleep Solution and bought the Sears book (skimmed it). At this rate, I don't even have time to do reading on sleep because half of my day is spent in an attempt to get him to sleep. Nothing works. Please help.
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Re: the crib is a stimulant...please help
I just had a conversation about sleep books with my DH. Why on earth do they write a 200 - 400 page book on helping a child sleep better when the reader is obviously sleep deprived??? All 'sleep books' should be handouts!!
What's in the crib? Do you have a mobile? Is there a bright bumper or sheet? What about the walls. Is there a lot of things hanging or painted on the wall? What's the lighting like in the nursery? How long is he awake when you put him down for a nap?
Questions, questions and more questions... sorry. Do you have white noise going on in his room? Does he do this at bed time? Do you have a bedtime routine? If you have a bedtime routine do you do a shortened version for naps?
We have stripped his crib of visual distractions - no mobile anymore, nothing in the crib...dark room (we tried light). We now turn a fan on (he's sensitive to noise, so we thought the white noise would help, but it only does a little). Initially, he's sleepy but awake, but as I mentioned, he completely wakes up when he goes down into the crib (and this can go on for an hour). Once he is asleep, he predictably wakes up very fussy at the 45 minute mark - it is rare that we can get him back to sleep again. I've tried a naptime routine, but it has been such a struggle that I guess I've abandon it...I should try to establish a consistent one again (if anyone has suggestions re: a routine that works, let me know). We spend so much time trying to get him to sleep that we've lost consistency. I get so frustrated that my husband takes over, and vice versa (we have lost all of our couple time because of this issue)...and btw, I'm an extremely patient person (I work with children who have significant behavioral issues for a living). Obviously, parenting is a different story:(
Sorry you're going through this...it is so frustrating when your LO won't sleep. Sometimes you just have to leave your LO in the crib and let him figure out how to sleep for himself. There probably will be crying, but sometimes LOs need the space to learn to put themselves to sleep.
DS has never been a good sleeper either. There were times when I would put him in the crib and he would do the same thing as yours...start babbling, kicking his legs, etc. As soon as I left the room, he'd start crying. So I'd go back and pick him up and either rock/nurse to sleep. I eventually ended up having to hold him for naps unless he was in the car or stroller. His nighttime sleep was getting pretty bad too even when we brought him into our bed. So we finally decided to sleep train even though I had been against CIO.
I read NCSS and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child for any info that might be helpful. We finally started sleep training using the Sleepeasy Solution which is like Ferber. NCSS was too impractical for us when I tried it. But I did take a few things from the book like giving him a lovey for comfort. The sleep training has been going well so far. He's cried less than I thought he would, but I knew he was ready for it. I just hadn't been giving him the space to learn on his own.
GL to you...I know how hard and frustrating it can be!
I have struggled with this very same issue for the past month and I have found myself lying on the floor sobbing as well out of frustration over getting my LO to nap. We're still working on it, but what I found was that my LO was transitioning his naps from several catnaps through the day to 3 longer naps and I was the one who didn't get the memo about this! So I struggled to force him to sleep at whatever time I thought he should be going down and he would act tired and then as soon as I put him down he would start kicking his legs and pop his eyes wide open. This was so frustrating. One day I finally decided to keep him up just a little longer than usual. He would show signs of tiredness, but I would wait just a bit longer to put him down when he was plenty tired and this helped. For those times that he still wouldn't go down, I would try for 15 minutes and if unsuccessful I would bring him back down to the living room and let him play for another 10 or 15 minutes. Then we would try again. Eventually he would go down. Fighting him on it did not help at all... it would just lead to both of us being frustrated and crying! I stopped following the "rules" and just went with the flow.
Good luck... I know it's exhausting and aggravating! Deep breaths!