4 Month Sleep Torture

Yes, we are definitely going through the 4 month sleep regression torture. I had never heard of this whole sleep regression thing until I had a baby and started researching about baby sleep. I was dreading its arrival, and now it is here.

First of all, if you have kids and are thinking, 4 month sleep regression? I don’t remember so-and-so going through that. then you are very lucky. Some kids have a few weeks of slightly disrupted sleep so parents might barely notice it. Others, like mine, use it as a way to test his already stressed out parents. 🙂 I will admit that we were falling into some bad habits before we hit this stage: rocking/patting/nursing to sleep and bed-sharing being the big ones. Not that there is anything wrong with any of these! When I read The Baby Sleep Book by the Sears family, one thing really stood out to me: If you resent it, change it. And when I was reading the book, I really wasn’t resenting any of the things we were doing at the time. But a month later? Resentment is setting in.

Here’s what we are dealing with: Naps have been quite short. 30-45 minutes most of the time. Because Gerrit’s naps are short, he should be getting 4 or 5 of them, I think. But he will take 3 naps and then fight me on that 4th nap. I think he fights so hard on that last nap because he’s already overtired from the previous short naps. So after a day of poor napping, I decide he needs an early bedtime. So we move into the bedtime routine: bath, book, boob, bed. Often he’s so tired that he conks out right away. But then the fun begins. He will wake up 40-45 minutes after he first falls asleep. When he falls back to sleep, we try to get him back in his bed. Sometimes he stays asleep (but wakes up 5 minutes later), but often his eyes pop open and it’s back to square one. So we play this game until 11pm or so when Andrew & I are just tired of it. So we get ready for bed, I pick up the fussing Gerrit, and we all go to bed. Gerrit almost instantly falls asleep then. A little bit later, Andrew falls asleep. And then I lay there awake until 1:30 or 2:00 in the morning. Then there are several night wakings by Gerrit, although I never let him fully wake up. I just open up my top so he can nurse. Sometimes he seems to take a good feeding, other times he’s just nursing back to sleep. But I feel like I’m looking at the clock every 1-2 hours, so I’m not getting quality sleep. Gerrit is up for the day between 7:30 and 8:30. And then the cycle begins again.

I don’t think this setback in his sleep would bother me as much if he hadn’t had those two good nights of sleep. I really thought we were on to something! But when he regressed, I was in tears. Literally. One of those nights, I was sitting on the bed sobbing while rocking a screaming baby. I knew it was affecting my sleep too. Not just sharing the bed with a baby, but me not being able to fall asleep. I think the combination of my sleep deprivation and my building anxiety was making it impossible for me to settle down and relax enough to sleep.

After nearly a week of constantly helping Gerrit get back to sleep, I contacted a local sleep consultant. She offers free 15-minute phone consults to kind of evaluate what’s going on and offer some basic advice. She told me things that I already knew: Gerrit is going through the 4 month sleep regression as well as a big cognitive growth spurt (Wonder Week 19). Her main advice was to keep bed-sharing for right now. She said it was important that we were all getting sleep. Basically, just to hang out in survival mode and see if he gets back on track in a few weeks.

It has still been hard on us. Andrew & I spend most evenings going back and forth trying to get Gerrit to sleep on his own. It definitely causes some tension, because neither of us know what to do to help Gerrit. I’ve gotten advice from family and several friends (I appreciate it, ladies!), but I think I make things worse by trying to implement different techniques all the time. 😦

So now I’m back to tracking Gerrit’s sleep. I really just want to see how much sleep he’s actually getting on a daily basis. In my mind, it just doesn’t seem like it could be enough, so I’m hoping I’m wrong. After day #1 it looks like he is roughly getting 12 hours of sleep a day. Seems a bit on the low side, but the average for his age is 11-14 hours a day. Part of me thinks I should be relieved that he’s in “the window,” but then there’s part of me that worries that maybe that amount of sleep isn’t enough for him.

We are really trying to encourage Gerrit to go to sleep “drowsy but awake.” It’s supposed to teach him to self-sooth rather than need one of us to help him go back to sleep through rocking or nursing. He does better with it some nights than others, and he does better with it for morning naps than afternoon ones. I don’t push it in the middle of the night though. Once I’ve gone to sleep for the night, if he doesn’t easily fall back to sleep in his bed, then he comes to bed with me.

I’m really hoping that he will get back on track after this 4 month age. It will roughly coincide with us moving into a house and FINALLY getting settled here in North Carolina, so we’ll see if things get better or worse for awhile. I’d love to start working on getting Gerrit into his own bedroom (after I decorate!), but I don’t want to do that until he’s sleeping better.

So have any of you had a baby with less than desirable sleep patterns? 🙂 I’d love to hear what worked (and didn’t work) for you!