CIO (cry it out)?

The most popular methods on the internet are some form of crying it out (CIO). If you’re feeling hesitant, you can use the Ferber method which allows you to check on the baby at several intervals. Or you can just leave baby until she falls asleep. I haven’t read the actual books, and I don’t plan on buying them (the library has them permanently checked out). DH decided that we needed to sleep train our daughter, and he figured I am too soft to do it and decided to take it upon himself to implement it.

The first night, she took 18 min to fall asleep, but the wailing hurt my conscience (I opted to stay for the session, promising not to interfere). The second night, she took the same amount of time, and the wailing got to me. I think it had to do with guilt from the first night, and then going through the same thing again. It just wasn’t right.

Baby is anxious about being left alone

There is one thing I did not mention about our daughter that happened in the last months – she does not like being left alone. If I step into the kitchen to get a drink and leave her in the living room, she starts crying immediately. I don’t know if the sleep training books discuss this, but IMO, it’s a bit too much for my daughter to have to deal with being alone on top of putting herself to sleep. I wanted to deal with only one issue at a time. Even though DH was against stopping the CIO method the second night when I did interfere, he was open to trying something different the next day.

After reading up a little more, we decided that the crucial part of sleep training was putting our daughter into the crib awake. We will then try to teach her to go to sleep on her own slowly. Some people refer to this as Fading Out, and warn that it could take a while. I wanted to let my daughter put herself to sleep knowing that she was not left alone.

Adjusting sleep training for baby’s personality

The 3^rd night, we put her into the crib awake after nursing and putting on her sleeping sack. DD was happy and lay there for 30 min smiling at me. Then she started whining, and eventually crying. We tried to implement it like a CIO, refusing to pick her up, and telling her that she needs to go to sleep at intervals. It was a disaster: she cried furiously for 30 min, and was more awake and upset than ever. I think it’s her stubborn personality. This humane version of CIO was way worse than the turn off the lights and leave the room version. She knew we were there and leaving her alone, and she was absolutely furious.

I was at a loss at what to do, and DH stepped in to coo at her to get her to calm down. He was having a throat issue, so I took over and defaulted to singing Rock-a-bye Baby. She instantly calmed down…whew. And after another 20 min of singing, patting her belly and holding her hand, she fell asleep. I kept singing for another 10 min just in case, gradually stopping the patting and hand holding. It was a disaster, but we learned.

Finding a sleep training method that works for you

The 4^th night, we went with the routine, then putting her into the crib and then music to soothe her. She started fussing so we started the Rock-a-bye Baby, and she fell asleep after 20 min. Since we bypassed the 30 min of silence and the 30 min of crying, she went to bed an hour earlier.

One thing I didn’t mention before is that letting her fall asleep in the crib had a giant advantage, CIO or the fading method – she didn’t wake after falling asleep, unlike when I nursed her and put her into the crib.

Tonight is the 5^th night, and she fell asleep after 10 min of Rock-a-bye Baby. We have definitely made progress, and honestly, I am happy to sing her lullabies for 10 min while she falls asleep feeling secure. But we will keep working at it: the goal is to be able to leave her in the crib and let her fall asleep on her own. I am hoping that we will be able to skip the lullaby at some point, and just sit and smile at her while she puts herself to sleep.

Drawing on my own childhood experience

I feel very strongly about letting children fall asleep feeling safe because of my childhood. My parents went with the bedsharing route when I was 5 months old because I fell asleep instantly that way. I would not sleep well in the crib even when room sharing. All throughout growing up and to this day, I still sleep better when I share a room. I don’t remember my childhood much, but I do remember how my parents tried to get me to sleep independently by the time I was 4 or 5. I was able to put myself to bed sleeping in their bed, and they would transfer me to my own bed in my own room afterwards. But when I woke up in the dark, I was terrified and I would cry outside their bedroom door, unwilling to disturb them. Fortunately for me, my little sister arrived soon after and I had another person to share the room with, even if it was a tinier person than me.

For as long as she needs me, my daughter will always be welcome in my room.

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Our baby is slightly delayed in her gross motor skills at 3 months, and her pediatrician asked if we wanted to talk to a physical therapist for tips on what to do at home. Early intervention is important in all aspects of development (and healthcare), so we opted to meet with a PT to talk. Of course the very night before our appointment, I see this comment buried in a thread on the BeyondTheBump subreddit saying that we should be rolling baby onto tummy time – this is so that she understands the relation between being on her tummy and on her back, and just the general idea of rolling.

The very next day, the PT says the same thing. Roll baby onto back/tummy for tummy time. Great! Why didn’t the pediatrician say that 2 months ago? Better now than later I guess. We can also just let baby lie on her side to get used to other positions besides back-lying.

The other thing the PT mentioned which I didn’t know about is the transition to sitting. Baby likes sitting up so that she can look around. We have been holding her in our laps, or leaning her against us. There is one more option called the tripod position, which is baby using her arms to support herself while sitting down. This pose is important because it strengthens her arms, preparing her to crawl. Of course, she is also slowly building arm muscle when she’s on her tummy, but tummy time doesn’t require as much arm strength. The PT recommended that we start this after 4 months.

The last thing the PT mentioned was introducing our baby to her knee. I’m not sure what that’s about, but we haven’t really done it since baby is grabbing her toes already.

Since the PT’s visit, we have been rolling her, and letting her sit in the tripod pose. As a transition, we also let her just lie on her side. She has accidentally rolled from tummy to back once at 4.5 months, on that rare day when she lay down while being on her tummy. It’s actually a really natural transition once she lays her head down while being on her tummy, to being on her side, and then on her back. I just can’t figure out how to encourage her to put her head down from puppy pose. If you have tips, share them!

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I read a blogpost that was on the sidebar link on the sleeptraining sub-Reddit on how to transition from the RnP, and I’ve seen other posters describe their experience. We only adopted one of the modifications suggested for the transition, the U-shaped towel to make the crib more cosy and less open.

We made one other change prior to the transition: we stopped swaddling her, and started putting her in a sleeping sack. She’s been escaping her swaddle for a long time now, but the RnP is a rather warm bassinet so we haven’t been too bothered by it. But she would be completely exposed in the crib when she escapes her swaddle. We put her in a sleeping sack for a couple of nights, and she was fine with it.

The first night, we let her sleep in the RnP for 30 min before shifting her to the crib. She slept for a long time till she started fussing at 8am from hungar, and couldn’t go back to sleep after the dreamfeed. We wanted to sleep longer so we put her back in the RnP, and she fell right back to sleep. The second night, we put her directly into the crib after she fell asleep, and she slept till 9am with a 4:30am dreamfeed. The same happened the 3^rd night. So far so good.

She is waking up earlier than before, at 9am instead of 11am, but she is also compensating by taking more naps during the day. While I think the transition went okay, we’re going to keep the RnP for a while longer in case we have to deal with the dreaded 4 month sleep regression.

I regret not taking more pictures of her when she was a newborn in the RnP. My little girl is growing up.

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Ready for Solids vs Eager for Solids

My daughter is now 3 months. Ever since she grew more conscious, she’s been interested in us eating. She has learned to smack her lips, and to chew imaginary food. My mom tells her that Grandma knows she wants to eat, but she’s going to have to wait a little longer. She thinks we may start introducing solids early, although seeing how she’s having problems with her neck, we may actually be delayed.

I’ve seen a lot of posts in online forums about how someone’s baby is “so ready for solids”, and I think of my daughter. It’s only recently when I was talking to my BIL (Brother-In-Law) that I realized that “ready for solids” is a technical term. Thankfully it was too early for me to make any mistakes.

Kellymom.com has a nice list of signs to look out for to determine when baby is developmentally ready for solids:

• Baby can sit up well without support.
• Baby has lost the tongue-thrust reflex and does not automatically push solids out of his mouth with his tongue.
• Baby is ready and willing to chew.
• Baby is developing a “pincer” grasp, where he picks up food or other objects between thumb and forefinger. Using the fingers and scraping the food into the palm of the hand (palmar grasp) does not substitute for pincer grasp development.
• Baby is eager to participate in mealtime and may try to grab food and put it in his mouth.

Also, baby should be at least 6 months old so that her gut lining is fully developed to minimize the development of allergies.

But she is so ready for solids

What should you do if baby is ready for solids, but below 6 months? I’ve seen a lot of forum posters mention that they introduce solids at as early as 4 months. Kellymom.com suggests allowing baby to participate without giving her solids. For instance, giving her expressed breastmilk in a sippy cup, or giving frozen breastmilk slush (I didn’t see a recipe, but I would probably follow directions on how to make granite) while seated at the dining table.

In many ways, I’m glad that I’m blogging about my experience as a FTM, because it forces me to read up on issues so that I can rant responsibly online.

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Amazon reviewers recommend the Fisher Price Kick and Play Piano Gym

My favorite way to shop is online, specifically through Amazon, even when I’m in a store. Amazon is great because they have consolidated hundreds of reviews by real people to help me decide whether to buy. The best selling activity gym is the Fisher-Price Kick and Play Piano Gym, so we got it. (We had good results with the FP Rock and Play, which was also highly recommended on Amazon. I’m a believer in FP products now.) I briefly considered the activity gym sold by Ikea (they have random gems sometimes), which had some good reviews that were questionable (“the wooden design fits into the aesthetics we had envisioned…”).

Baby likes her kick piano, I think

I was a little upset with myself for forgetting to buy my baby a toy. The other kids had a headstart, lying in their gym from day 1. Fortunately, most parents report that their newborns don’t really show any awareness of their toy until week 4 and beyond, so we haven’t missed out on too much fun.

Baby didn’t seem that excited about having things to look at overhead, but I think she understood the kick piano part pretty quickly. She does randomly kick while lying in her crib, but she definitely kicked more when there was musical feedback from the kick piano. Her first play session lasted 10 mins, and I thought it was a success. We can work on the hanging toys later.

Weeks later, our baby still hasn’t shown much interest in swatting at the hanging toys. But she does enjoy kicking the piano first thing when she wakes up in the morning. I leave her on the piano gym while I wash up in the morning. One weekend when she was about 10 weeks, my husband said “she’s kicking the hanging toys. Is that for real?” We watched her for a little longer, and it was for real. Baby hasn’t figured out how to use her t-rex arms, but she could curl her legs up to kick the hanging toys. I was pretty proud of her for figuring out that the things above could be reached by kicking.

Let them figure out how to play

One of my friends insists on buying open-ended toys for children, that promote multiple play methods like color pencils and paper. Educators also advise us to let children figure out how to play instead of showing them how to play – the kid who figures out how to play will come up with tens of ways to play, while the kid who learns how to play will only play the one way she was shown. (I’ll have to admit that I only read a review of The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik. I should try to read the actual book.)

Baby is 12 weeks old, and I think over the last week or so, she has finally figured out she can use her hands to swat at the hanging toys. That’s great, except now I have to figure out what the next toy purchase should be. That’s a question for the pediatrician next week, although I suspect she will ask me to focus on developing her neck muscles.

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What this is is a bottle with a long skinny tube that you attach to your boob with surgical tape. Who it is for is women who have low milk supply and need to bottlefeed formula but want to breastfeed. This way, baby gets food, and the breast gets the stimulation it needs. There is also no nipple confusion. Hopefully after some use, your supply will increase and you can ditch the SNS.

I found a good youtube video explaining how to use the Medela SNS with tips. For people waiting for their milk to come in, the starter $20 system is probably sufficient.

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Do you need a giant freezer stash?

A few weeks ago, I was preparing to transition to working part-time, and one of the issues that came up was creating a freezer stash. I read up about how to create a substantial freezer stash painlessly, and got started a couple of weeks early (thinking I was late to the game actually). In the meantime, I was also starting to go out some times in the afternoons to leave my baby with grandma for practice. Those days, I just leave the pumped milk in the fridge instead of freezing because my baby wants her milk ASAP, and my mom doesn’t always have time to thaw frozen milk if she runs out. It seemed a superior system to me – I don’t have to buy a ton of milk freezing bags, and take up a ton of space in the freezer. I know there are people who leave fresh milk for their babies, but everyone on the internet forums seemed obsessed with pumping up a stash to use. You can tell pumping large quantities is an obsession when “How I pumped and froze 1000oz of breastmilk” is next to the “How I earned $100,000 working from home” ad spam on the sidebar.

How do you use your freezer stash? I am under the impression that people take out the oldest milk, and freeze the day’s pumping, keeping the supply constant. Of course, there are those who freeze 6 month’s worth of milk so that they can stop pumping but continue feeding their LO breastmilk. In the latter case, you will need to freeze your breastmilk. But for most people, the freezer stash is more of a just in case they run low on milk that one day or that one afternoon. If this is your situation, you don’t need more than a day’s worth of milk in the freezer.

Freezing kills the white blood cells in breastmilk

I’m a biology researcher, and in my work we have to carefully consider how to store biological samples depending on their purpose. The freezer is usually an inferior form of storage. Freeze-thawing kills many types of samples, and we usually have to include additives to keep things in good shape. But you can’t add stuff to breastmilk to freeze it.

So what exactly is in breastmilk that will die in the freezer? White blood cells for one. If you remember from high school biology, an animal cell is just a fragile bag of water and stuff. Water expands when frozen, disrupting the membrane and bursting/killing the cell. Those white blood cells in breastmilk are all killed by freezing.

Slightly more complicated are the proteins. We don’t know all of the proteins in breastmilk, but there are probably hundreds of them. Some of them, like amylase and lipase, survive freezing. Those are rare examples. Most proteins will be damaged by the freezing process and inactivated. This is why you can store your freshly expressed milk in the fridge for 5 days, but your thawed milk won’t last 24 hours in the fridge. The antibacterial properties are much diminished by freezing.

Age appropriate breastmilk

There is the other consideration of age of milk. One of the best things about breastmilk is that your body tailors the composition to your baby. There is more fat in breastmilk for older babies, more water in breastmilk in the summer. By rotating your frozen milk out and your fresh milk in, your optimized breastmilk is no longer optimized. An occasional feed of frozen milk won’t make a difference, but if you are feeding your baby frozen milk everyday for 8 hours unnecessarily, you should think again.

My intended milk cycling system

My current freezer stash is ~10 bags of 3oz, saved over random pumping sessions when I was engorged and had to remove the milk (ate oatmeal cookies without realizing how potent they were for instance). I think this is more than sufficient for emergencies.

My plan for when I start work again next week is to pump exactly what my baby needs each day. I’ll be gone for about 5 hours, so it’s 5 x 1.5 oz = 7.5 oz. It seems a little ambitious for one pumping session, so I’ll be pumping in the middle of the night, once at work, and possibly when I get home/before I go to work, depending on when my baby feeds. I’ll store the milk in the fridge for the next day. Friday’s milk will be used sometime over the weekend when we go out – I haven’t figured out how to breastfeed in public, so we bottlefeed when we go out.  Any extras will be frozen, and if we need more than 7.5oz, we will take it from the freezer – this also means I will have to start pumping more than 7.5 oz.

As for the freezer stash, if we don’t end up using it along the way, I plan to cycle the bags after a month. I care about the changes in nutritional content as my baby ages, so it would be better to cycle it regularly. If I end up using an emergency bag, I will be replacing it that same day as much as possible.

It will become a lot more challenging when I have to work full-time, but the plan for now is to increase the number of pumping sessions at work. One should be pumping every 3 hours to keep the milk supply, so I would probably have to increase it to at least twice at work, and immediately after reaching home/before I leave for work to last 9 hours (13.5 oz!). I’ll work it out properly when that time comes.

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When do babies start to babble?

According to the internet, 4 months, which is why I thought our little bundle of joy was right on track. At 8 weeks, she looks like she understands what I’m trying to say when I have a conversation with her, and politely blinks or waves her arms and legs in response. She sometimes makes sounds.

At her 8 week well-check up, the pediatrician tries to have a conversation with her. The little darling stares at the lights on the ceiling. The ped tries a little harder, and our baby girl waves her arms a little, and eventually grunts a little, although she looks like she was paying attention. Verdict: no good. She is supposed to be babbling. What?

We will have a follow up in a month to check on her social development. In the meantime, I have to engage with her more. It’s intuitive, but someone should spell it out for me anyway: if the baby makes a sound, encourage her by responding and hope she makes more sounds.

These days, I explain to my daughter that she needs to be noisier. I don’t know how to make her less interested in lights than people though.

Baby has low muscle tone

We checked on her muscle development too, and the ped says that she’s behind as well. But how behind is she?

We found a useful video on youtube showing the typical development of a 2 month-old. I’m posting it here for your reference. Yup, she’s behind. But everyone I know swears that their baby didn’t get that far at 2 months.

Other Tummy Time moves

Another useful follow up video is this one which shows alternatives to the standard lay-on-flat-surface tummy time. We have tried them, and found that she responds much better to being placed on the lap.

We have a follow up appointment in 4 weeks instead of 8, and hopefully we will have caught up by then. I don’t know what happens if she hasn’t caught up, or how much catching up she needs to do. What did people do before the internet? I don’t think pediatricians used to spend hours with their patients explaining everything. Anyway, fingers crossed for the next 3 weeks.

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We were recently concerned with the amount of sleep that our baby is getting, and decided to track it (for some reason, we didn’t track her sleep the first 7 weeks). After only a couple of days, it became clear that she had a distinct day and night pattern: she sleeps from ~midnight to ~noon every day (I have to wake her up for feeds), and only naps between noon and midnight. Wow, we seem to have accidentally sleep trained her.

Sleeping through the night is not night weaning

I didn’t know that there was a difference, but it’s obvious now. This means someone else out there is confused as well. Sleeping through the night is well, sleeping through the night. Like from 9pm to 6am. Night weaning is when the baby doesn’t eat at night anymore. Babies are strange creatures who can eat half asleep, so just because they are sleeping through the night doesn’t mean that they are night weaned.

When I first heard about sleeping through the night at 2 months, I thought yay! We can get good sleep after 2 months if we do the French method. We have hit the 2 month mark, and while baby is sleeping through the night, she should not go through the night without feeding. Currently, we wake her up to feed every 4-5 hours if she doesn’t wake up on her own. She sleeps from about midnight to almost noon. She kind of sleeps from 7pm to 10pm, and has a brief period of activity before we put her back to bed at midnight. Given that we didn’t have to very actively get her on the schedule, I am happy with the outcome.

Setting up the easiest sleep training ever

From the start, I set out to help the baby develop a sense of time. We had dark curtains, and used only a small dim light in the bedroom, and made sure the living room is awash in light during the day (and we make it dark at night too) – all the better to make sure that her wake-sleep cycle follows daylight cycles ASAP.

I tried to make sure she sleeps better at night. We had a daytime sleeping area, and a night time sleeping area – we have the crib in the living room, where the adults are around all day, and the Rock and Play in the bedroom, where she will be spending the night. For the uninitiated, the Rock and Play is a bassinet from Fisher Price that you will see pop up everywhere over the internet where people discuss baby sleep. For whatever reason, babies sleep for longer in them (from 30 min to 9 hours! It’s a miracle!). It’s a little warm, so we use it only in the bedroom, which is cooled by A/C at night.

From the Rock and Play to 4 hour intervals at 2 weeks

From day 1, she sleeps in the Rock and Play at night, and takes daytime naps in the crib. The newborn baby is very sleepy, so it may not make much of a difference initially. We did notice that she naturally wakes after 1-3 hours in the crib, but can sleep for longer in the Rock and Play (I always have to wake her up after 3 hours, she doesn’t stir). At 2 weeks when we knew she was gaining weight fine, we stretched it out to 4 hours between feedings at night. That made such a difference.

We started out with 3 hour intervals because that is what the hospital was doing from day 1. I was managing with 3 hour intervals, but it made such a difference when we started 4 hour intervals at night. Going from 3 to 4 hours between feedings may not seem like a big deal but it is. Diapering and feeding, and putting the baby back to sleep can take 45 min to 1 hour, leaving you 2 or 3 hours to sleep. We continued with the schedule – poorer crib sleeping during the day, and more sound sleep in the RnP at night – and magically at 7 weeks when I finally tracked her sleep, I noticed that she had developed a decent sleeping schedule.

Transition from Rock and Play

Maybe I got lucky with a unicorn baby. I think we maximized our chances of “sleep training” by making sure that day and night are distinct, and making sure she sleeps better at night in the RnP than during the day. I recently read that my habit of only feeding from one boob is helpful too – she gets the hindmilk, which is fattier and can last her for longer.

We will have to transition from the RnP to a real crib, but others before me have worked out how to do it. It’s a little awkward that she sleeps at midnight, but I’ll take it. I hear that she will sleep earlier as she gets older.

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Cluster feeding during growth spurts

The first few growth spurts are very closely spaced: at 7-10, at 2-3 weeks, at 4 – 6 weeks. Sometimes, it felt like the growth spurt never ended: there was always a time of the day when she wanted to be fed every hour. Sometimes it was the afternoon, and other times it was the evening. I fed her on demand.

She recently turned 8 weeks, and she still feeds hourly at some point everyday. Apparently, that is not normal. I happened to talk to a friend who had a baby a few days before me, and she said that her baby doesn’t have to eat every hour. Doesn’t her baby clusterfeed? Not everyday. She thought I should check it out with the pediatrician.

The night before the ped appointment, daddy had to stay home with baby while I attended an event. I left them pumped milk, and came back to an exhausted daddy. Baby girl had apparently been suckling on the bottle without drinking much for 3 hours. We know that she can eat 2 oz in less than 10 min, so it wasn’t an issue with the nipple.

Comfort feeding is everyday

The pediatrician called it comfort feeding. Of course. I had read about it too, but I didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. The pediatrician said it is appropriate to use a pacifier in such situations. Oh.

I didn’t grow up with a pacifier. In fact, my mom is irrationally strongly against the use of pacifiers. “Looks indecent.” I was agnostic, but if my baby needs one, she gets one. I just needed to find out more about what I was going to give her.

Issues related to pacifier use

Pacifier use has been linked with lower SIDS incidence (although others say that no such effect exist if we correct for some factor). A pacifier is used to soothe the baby, which is fine by me. The pacifier is supposed to replace the thumb or hands as a soothing device. More importantly, self-soothing by thumb/hand leads to orthodontic issues, and it’s harder to wean off since you can’t take away the baby’s hands. Fair enough…I’m sold. Besides, there are other issues while putting her to sleep. Like how she seems to magically awake when I take my boob away. S so it’s not a bad idea to have a detached fake boob that I can leave with her till it falls out. Plus, I can introduce the pacifier while she is in the crib, so I don’t have to move her after she falls asleep.

It’s still not clear to me when to use it, in case I misread real hunger for comfort feeding. But there is a certain hour of the night when she is stuck to my boob for 2/3^rd of the hour which I am sure is a good place to introduce the pacifier. Now, she just needs to actually take it – she much prefers the boob to the bottle. She can probably tell the difference between the pacifier and me.

In case you are worried about affecting milk supply, many sources say that pacifier use will not have any effects if introduced after supply is established, after 4-6 weeks. We are safely in that zone. I hope she falls asleep more easily tonight.

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