Nursing Baby to Sleep

Every evening, and afternoons when I'm not working, I breastfeed the baby to sleep for her nap or for the night. I've noticed that lately, she'll be fussy and acting tired, so we'll go lie down in her bed and she'll nurse, and look like she's about to fall asleep. Suddenly, she perks up and she's ready to play for a few hours! Now that she's just past one year, I guess she's reducing how much sleep she needs each day. Not long ago, she needed two to three naps every day, and now it looks like one.

An acquaintance who is also a breastfeeding mom referred to the time spent nursing her baby to sleep as baby jail - that is, she said "Last night, in baby jail..." I had to ask what she meant.

I was a bit taken aback. There are lots of times that I'd rather be doing something else, and sometimes I kick myself for not bringing my beloved iPhone to bed with us, so I can read/tweet while she dozes. But to call it jail?

Someone needs to parent her to sleep, I'm firmly committed to not leaving her to cry her way to sleep. (Here are some good reasons, other than one's gut instinct, on why not to let babies cry every night to go to sleep.)

It's usually easier for me to breastfeed her to sleep that it would be for my husband or I to rock/walk/stroller/pat her to sleep. She loves to nurse.

We fought hard to be able to breastfeed and overcame a big obstacle (that shouldn't have been so big). I feel like I won that battle and I don't want to stop doing it just because it's inconvenient or I might be better off blogging/talking on the phone/... um what else might I be doing this evening?

I'm glad I can help her sleep this way and will continue to do so as long as she wants. Unless she wants me to come to college with her!

Any odd things you've heard lately from committed breastfeeders?

Go Read This Instead...

Because I'm too busy to write up my own thoughts, go check out these posts that are resonating with me these days:

• Annie of PhD in Parenting is in Berlin and finding processed food in Europe are less problematic...
• and links to the interesting, typically off the handle Fox News coverage of bed-sharing with your baby.
• Harriet of See Theo Run shares her thoughts on the Angel's Cradle at St Paul's Hospital. I'm glad she brought this up - it's so sad that it's needed but important that it exists, because it is needed.
• Gina of The Feminist Breeder writes about and gets great comments back on leaving kids in cars.
• Arwyn of Raising Boychick writes, as always thoughtfully and provocatively, on teaching patience to children...
• and in an older post, writes about hating pink and rejecting the feminine.
• The Fearless Formula Feeder shares a provocative story about why one mom did not try to breastfeed her child.

Do you have any favourite all time or favourite right now posts you want to share?

A Quickie: Some of My Favourite Parenting Posts

After a week of snowbound staying home with the baby joy, you might think I'd have some original thought to share. I do. I'm just having difficulty deciding how I want to frame it.

In the meantime, here's a new favourite and some old favourites that I'd like to share with you. The first I just got fwd'd today. The others are ones I literally return to re-read periodically. I hope you find them as interesting and wonderful as I have:

• The Inconvenient Truth About Parenting. Monica on dealing with your stuff and letting your kid be themself.
• Mindfully Loving My Children. On the languages of love and how Melodie's kids know she loves them.
• CIO: 10 Reasons It's Not For Us. On crying it out as a baby sleep strategy and the science behind why Annie won't use it.
• On Breastfeeding and Things We Don't Talk About. Arwyn on what makes her uncomfortable about nursing. This post scared me while I was pregnant as I worried I'd experience the same thing. I've not, but I still think it's important to talk about.

I'll leave you with these to chew on and I hope to be back with you soon on some other stuff I'm chewing on.

Would you like to leave me with some of your favourite (re)reading material?

UPDATE: Almost - well, briefly actually did - forgot:

• Venusimo. Honest to Betsy on the female equivalent of machismo. It speaks to a lot my ongoing - not dissatisfaction but - lack of satisfaction with my birth experience.

On Sleeping

As I've mentioned, I take parenting advice with some grains, or bags, of salt. People I talk to seem to be obsessed with sleep.

The first few weeks after Em was born, sleep was precious and infrequent. If she was sleeping, I'd wake up all the time to check that she was ok. And then she woke up needing attention/love/food often. Babies are like that! I don't know how parents who put their babies in another room to sleep manage the anxieties of those first weeks.

But then she adapted to our patterns and started mostly sleeping at night and mostly being awake during the day. I started trusting that she'd live through the night. There was that rough day at seven weeks when my Dads were here, when I'd kept her in the Infantino baby carrier all day, so she'd been asleep all day, and then only slept, and thus I only slept, four hours that night.

We're now in a nice routine where she naps once or twice a day for a few hours at a time and then sleeps from nine or ten in the evening to three or four in the morning for a brief snack, and then back to sleep again for a few more hours, often until seven in the morning. I've actually realized that it's often me (and my milk supply!) waking her up at four - she's no longer that hungry, so I usually pump a little extra for while I'm at work. And then we go back to sleep.

Before baby, I expected my sleep would be interrupted regularly with baby. First with feedings and diaper changes, then nightmares and nighttime illnesses, fevers, vomiting, then as she gets older, just worrying while she's out for an overnight with friends, and then parties and more! Parenting, as far as I'm concerned, is not about getting a good night's sleep.

I thought this was commonly known. I'm surprised by everyone's interest in how the baby is sleeping, if I'm sleeping, and the suggestions and tricks for getting her to sleep more. She's a baby with a teeny tiny tummy! I just don't expect her to sleep through the night for awhile, and even when she starts, I hear it's common to stop and start again.

I suspect that some people's inquiry as to whether or not I'm getting any sleep (and oh! I am, thank you) is more about making conversation, like commenting on the weather or making jokes about working hard vs hardly working. I know before I had a baby, I didn't know what to ask about them.

However, the parents who seem to be sleep obsessed make me wonder if I've just got a weirdly easy baby, which is entirely possible, or if my expectations are just a lot lower. I know the nights to come where she's awake once an hour again will be challenging. But knowing that they are coming makes them easier to deal with.

Do you talk a lot about sleep? What are/were your expectations about parenting and sleep?

Book review: Sleeping With Your Baby

Book review time! This is another book loaned to me by my doula. I'm so delighted that I read it.

It's a very short book (128 pages) with lots of white space and images, so it's a rather quick read. It's largely divided up into three sections: an introduction, a how to cosleep and an FAQ, but each section is divided up into mini-subsections of a page or three in length, so the whole book reads like a (well written and interesting) FAQ. 

The introduction gives some anthropological background on cosleeping in other cultures and species. The how to is probably the most important section as it explains how to cosleep and what can be dangerous. The FAQ addresses a hodgepodge of other miscellaneous concerns, such as twins, premature babies and lack of pediatrician support.

I had a couple of important take-aways from this book. First, the author, James McKenna points to research which shows a significant reduction in SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) when the baby sleeps in the same room as the parents. Note that this doesn't need to be in the same bed - just the same room. 

Second, McKenna gives the reader a bit of a taxonomy of cosleeping. Cosleeping means to have an infant share a bedroom with a parent. Bedsharing means to share the parents' bed with the infant.

McKenna is very strongly in favour of breastfeeding, though he acknowledges it may not work for everyone - but he says that cosleeping can very much support breastfeeding. 

I'm personally really glad I read this book. I always liked the idea of bedsharing, but for a number of reasons, which the how to cosleep section confirmed for me, I'd intuitively felt it was potentially dangerous for us to do (too many pillows, sometimes drinking too much, I do odd things in my sleep sometimes). But knowing that the SIDS risk reduction is just from cosleeping in the same room, not necessarily from bedsharing, is a great gift. 

Cosleeping is more acceptable to me and my DH, and fits better with his culture as well. How to sleep with your infant(s) is a very personal choice, and I'm so glad to come into this with more information.

I do feel that McKenna kind of glosses over the impact of bedsharing on a couple's sex life - this is the only place I found it addressed:

Intimacy will have to be less spontaneous. You may need to start scheduling time together... find some other place to be intimate... or move the baby to a crib or bassinet after he falls asleep.

I guess this was my biggest question about bedsharing - what about the sex? But perhaps that just reveals my naivete about what comes next in terms of post-partum sex frequency... I guess I'm trying to be optimistic.

Anyone have any other infant sleeping resource recommendations? I know there are a lot out there!