To cry or not to cry

Our little guy doesn’t sleep during the day. I recorded the past two days and the first day he slept from 12:40pm to 2:25pm. Now you may say-well thats a good nap, what do you mean your child doesn’t sleep? But then if you look at my log before and after that time, you’ll understand. He woke up at 6am and didn’t go to sleep until 12:40pm and after he woke up at 2:25pm he didn’t go back down and stay down for more than 5 min until midnight. so from 6am to midnight he slept 2 hours. And the second day was much like the first and these two days are much like the past month and a half.

Yes we know all about the whole put them down groggy, don’t let them stay up for more than an hour or two at most. We follow all of this advice. I can even tell you that he shows his sleepy signs 1 hour and 20 minutes from the time he last woke up. I start the nap routine process 1 hour after he wakes up so that he is in his bassinet when he shows these signs of sleepiness. He even sleeps AFTER I put him down-its not the setting in the bassinet that wakes him up. But sure enough 5min-at most 20min later he is awake.

This goes on all day so that by the time Cam comes home at 6pm I am utterly exhausted and hand him over. We don’t do “dinner” anymore. I don’t remember the last time Cammon and I actually talked about anything. My bedtime, people think I’m kidding, when I say I go to bed at 7pm-but I’m not. I really do go to bed at 7pm mosts nights out of the week so that I can get a head start on the little one-so Cammon and I have only 1 hour to see each other each day. And most of the time that one hour is spent with the baby

So to the point-to cry or not to cry. At 10 weeks old we feel like his fussiness/colic has decreased dramatically-most people don’t know and haven’t seen him in his fussiness, most think we have a very calm, peaceful and happy baby-and for the most part we do. But both of us are becoming exhausted trying to get this little guy to sleep.

So tonight we are going to see how long he cries.  We’ve never tried this before, well we’ve let him get fussy for 10min at the most.  He starts to cry hysterically about then and one of us will go in and pick him up.  He’ll cry in our arms for a good 5 mins after that and then poop out and fall asleep just to wake up and do it again.  But tonight we MUST try to help him get some sleep.  We are all overtired and exhausted.   The age old question is when to let them “cry it out.”  We’ve gotten so many different answers.  Some have said right from birth you make sure they sleep well so you don’t have a child who is 3 months worth overtired.  We’ve heard how you can’t spoil a baby and that by doing this he will think we’ve abandoned him and we need to wait till 4 or 5 months.

My thinking with both of these is as a new born-I want to pick them up all the time.  I want to watch for sleepy cues and help them sleep, but they are way to young to even attempt to self soothe.  On the other end though, is if we don’t all start getting some sleep NOW, if we wait another month or two, its not going to be healthy for anyone.

So we are going to try this week.  We start on a Wed. so that by the 3rd day if we are exhausted, it is the weekend and we can not have to worry about work.  Cammon doesn’t have any MAJOR due dates for projects right now and I am very ready to sleep better myself.

Cammon predicts 6 hours of crying.  I don’t think he will go that long.  And I’m not sure how long we will let him, but we will let everyone know how it went.  I will document sleep habits and times for the rest of the week so others can also see what worked and didn’t work for us.