Parental Dilemmas

Its amazing how many behavioral cycles a baby goes through, and so quickly at that. Reese is almost 4 months old and she is constantly changing. She has gone from waking up every 2-3 hours at night, to sleeping through the night, to waking up once to eat, back to waking up every 2-3 hours and then back to waking up once to eat. It keeps a new mom on her toes! She is finally getting to the age where a schedule is developing and it is tough! I used to be able to take her anywhere any time, no problem. I knew that she would sleep wherever we were and definitely did not need to worry to put her down to nap because she was constantly sleeping anyway. Oh how things change quickly. I knew this day was coming so luckily I started putting her down for at least a morning nap several weeks ago to get her used to it. Now she has 3 distinct naps everyday and if I don't put her down, who knows if she will actually sleep or not. I have now found myself planning my day around her sleeping schedule. I knew that day would come, but I didn't realize how quickly one baby stage morphs into the other. Along with this new nap routine has come my biggest dilemma as a parent so far, putting her to sleep at night. For the most part she goes down for naps like a dream child. I read her one book, sing her a couple songs while I rock her and put her down in her crib. She wakes up laughing and full of smiles about 45 min later. Now going down at night...a totally different story. As I mentioned, babies go through many different sleep cycles. When they are new, they are totally fine going to bed really late, say 10 or 11pm, when you would go to bed. This makes things really easy because you can just feed them and put them to bed. Since Reese still shares a room with us she would have no problem going to sleep since we were right there. As babies get older, they are awake more during the day and begin to need an earlier bed time. We drastically saw this change in Reese. She becomes obviously tired and ready for bed around 8:00pm now. Over the last couple weeks I have incorporated her same nap time routine into a bedtime routine in order to get her down earlier. This has proven to be a major challenge. Most the time she falls into a light sleep during our routine and will even go down without a peep...for about 10-15 min, maybe 30 if I am lucky. Then the wailing begins! So here is my dilemma...what is a mom to do? There are so many theories on this topic it is overwhelming! You have one extreme group saying that you should "sleep train" your child and let them scream in hysterics until they fall asleep, then you have the other extreme group saying that you should "wear" your child as much as possible and letting them even make a peep is risking that they won't trust you anymore. I don't really think my parenting strategy falls into either of these groups. I want to cuddle and love my baby but do believe in some sort of schedule; but at the same time I don't have the hear to let her scream her brains out for a long period of time. So which is it? What road to take. For now I have decided on the "graduated extinction" approach. This is where you let your baby cry, but go to them at timed intervals (first time 5 min, next time 10, 15, etc). This way you can still show your baby you are there, make sure they are not in pain (or thrown up on themselves in Reese's case), and leave them to go back to sleep. Let me tell you this is not easy. I have heard good things about this approach, but know it does take a time commitment. Supposedly it should take 3-9 days because the baby begins to catch on and learn to sleep. I am just hoping I have the strength to stick to this and find out if it works for us. It is little things like these that make parenting so difficult. Babies are not all the same, and something that works for one baby might not work for the other. So you just have to dive in and see what works for you and your baby and hope you won't mess them up too much! Parenting truly is the hardest job ever, after 4 months I am just starting to see this and I know it is just the beginning. I have a feeling it will just get harder and harder the older she gets. However, at the same time, as I see my baby laugh and smile and become her own person, I realize that it keeps getting better and better too! So here is to taking on a new challenge this next week, let's hope we come out better on the other side!