Dealing with catnapping is the worst. Especially when everyone is on hand to tell you just how much sleep your baby SHOULD be getting during the day, and just how simple it is to "resettle" them. I hope by sharing my catnapping woes I will help at least one poor soul going through the anguish I went through with Miss H.
In the first few weeks after Heike was born she was sleeping 5-6 hour stretches at night pretty much straight away, but the days were a different story. After that first sleepy week, in fact, we could hardly get her to sleep at all during the day without the help of my two best friends, the car and the pram. Oh and of course my new lover, the dummy (never leave me!). During this period I look back on as "the dark time," I would only have to begin to place Heike in the bassinet to be guaranteed a total fit. Cool, so now I knew how to bring on a meltdown - yay!
Thus began several weeks of intense and gruelling sleep training, which lasted until she was around 6-8 weeks old. It was with the help of hours of rocking (blaaaargh), a Fisher & Price Seahorse, patting, shushing, THE DUMMY (!!) and all the patience I could muster that Heike eventually began napping in her bed during the day. Sure, there were times when we packed it in and went on a looooong walk. There were also times I picked her up and rocked her to sleep. But, in general, it began working.
Towards the end of this period, it got progressively easier - there were times when I used a white noise CD downloaded off iTunes (such a good investment!) and just played it in the background while she slept. In the end I think it was about her conquering her "fear" of sleeping alone in her bed.
So, sleeping in her cot - success! But no matter what I did, I couldn't get her to sleep longer than 40 minutes. Some mums (smart ones!) would simply embrace this, figuring that it was natural and simply getting them up and putting them back down when they showed signs of being tired. Control freak mothers like myself may decide this is simply not good enough and spend many hours trying to "resettle" their baby in order to fit into an ideal sleep routine.
I can't emphasise enough how much I DON'T believe in resettling. But first, I should clarify exactly what I mean by that.
Some babies wake after only forty minutes and are visibly still tired. They are rubbing their eyes, grumpy, closing their eyes for a few seconds before opening them and crying. These babies can probably (PROBably) be resettled with a bit of persistance and, if you're using one, a dummy. A walk is a great way of resettling a baby, if you have the energy. But then there are the other babies - what I call the "true" catnappers - who wake after 40, 30, sometimes even 20 minutes with a big smile on their face and lots of energy. My only advice is...don't bother trying to resettle these babies!! For us, no amount of patting and singing would send Heike back to sleep - it would only send both her and I around the bend, and end in tears.
Think about the people you know. As a case study, I'll present me and my husband. Me, I need minimum 8 hours sleep a night to function. So much so that when my daughter was born I started going to bed at 7.30pm. I can then take a couple of naps in a day (okay, I never do this, but I could) and still be tired at 9pm. I'm a sleeper. My hubby on the other hand can go to be at 1am and wake at 5am and still achieve three times as much as I ever could in a day. He's insane. His energy is out of this world and, from what I've heard, it was like that when he was a baby too.
So, of course, all babies are going to have different energy levels too. Some will be sleepy and lazy (which all stories say I was) and others will be energiser bunnies. Embrace it - fighting it will only cause undue stress and anxiety, for you and your baby.
As an aside, Miss Heike did start taking longer naps at around four months, and it wasn't due to anything I did - it just happened. She grew into it. If only I could have back all those hours I wasted trying to resettle. She also slept eight hours or more at night from 6 weeks - which I've heard lots of big time catnappers do.
So take heart - it will get easier.
Z x
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