Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Did your child ever sleep?

I am very very very tired right now. DD stays up for days it seems like with hardly any napping. Then she crashes for 4-6 hours one day in her swing for a long nap. Due my DHs job, we go to bed after midnight all the time, and I've totally given up trying to get her to sleep before he comes home due to lots of reasons (dinner, we all wake up, alarm, dog gets excited blah blah blah.)

She fights sleep during the day and evening a lot and will keep nursing almost to sleep, then sit up with all this new energy, babbling and smiling at me but also grumpy because she is still tired. She'll even put her head down a lot.

Any advice? I've tried taking her in dark rooms, napping WITH her, etc. but nothing works unless SHE feels like sleeping at the time. She does take 10-20 minute catnaps in the swing or on my lap, though. She goes to sleep just fine at 1am or whatever and sleeps until 9-10am. I try to get her to sleep an hour or two each evening in the swing, but it doesn't always work.

I am not sure, but I think she is waiting for Daddy to get home. The only thing that can fix these hours is his switching jobs, so...

Please, advise!

Edit: She is 8.5 months. Also, she is walking half the time, so maybe her interest in walking is doing this more than usual?

I feel for you and remember that phase all.to.well! DS8 rarely slept as an infant...I was so exhausted that first 2 years, I barely remember any of it. My husband was deployed for the majority of those two years as well so I can't even say it was his work schedule...my child just did not believe sleep was necessary! I even tried herbal liquid remedies suggested by herbalists to promote inner " calming ", you name it... I tried it. Some little ones just do not think sleep is important. Do you stick to a pretty regular schedule with the little one or is it really random? I know when I had DS2/3 (twins) when DS8 was 3 years old...I KNEW there would be a strict schedule if I was to survive two of them through infancy and a toddler that didn't sleep. From the day I brought them home they were schedule babies and sleep came way more natural to them...DS8 was never on a schedule so I'm not sure if thats where I went wrong.
Some kids are just exhausting in their earlier years...however there is a light at the end of the tunnel...my DS8 decided sleep was important at about 5 haha...and now even sleeps IN if he can...( now I make HIM wake up as torture back Hopefully little one will decide that naps are important for her and mommy!

Well that gives me hope! I just called my mil to ask when DH started sleeping. I thought she said as a 1 year old. No, she actually said FOUR years old. Ahhh.

So, DH and I have been trying to get ourselves on a routine for a long long time and we haven't ever done it. I'm really trying so hard to get it together for our child, if nothing else. I've finally succeeded in making most of our meals "whole foods" and not processed, and I've gotten a lot of the chemicals out of our house, but there is so much left undone. I think my own perfectionism is showing, here. I have this ideal way I want things to be and maybe I'm asking too much of myself. I don't know. There seem to be other supermamas out there that manage to enrich their children's lives in all kinds of ways, cook organic vegan meals all day long, keep a clean home and still have time to blog about it lol.


Oh and boy do I feel for you with the deployments! Dh used to be in the military and those deployments were so hard. I can't imagine going through them with a baby.

Rhythms help, but they won't be the cure-all.

My 5 yo still doesn't sleep properly. The only way I could get him to nap from before he was one was in the sling, walk in the pram, or car. We basically had to trick him to sleep



Some children DO sleep. I know someone whose 3 yo still naps for 3 hours every afternoon. Imagine what I could do with that time!

And some are just liars too

DD slept great for the first 7 weeks of her life and then she went through a massive growth spurt (ended up off the chart for height/length) and was no longer able to stay asleep for more than 20 minutes at a time. I could set my watch by her - she would literally fly up in the air at 20 minutes and start crying when she landed back on the mattress. She would occasionally slip in a 40 minute cycle but that was it. Luckily she never developed that overtired grumpiness that most kids lacking sleep get.

At 14 months we discovered that she had sleep apnea - the way the docs explained it to me as soon as she would hit REM sleep her muscles would relax and her adenoids would drop, blocking her breathing passages. The flying off her bed was her brain shocking her awake so she could breathe. After repeating this cycle over and over (sometimes a dozen or more times) she would eventually be able to sleep for a few hours but as I recall it was rarely more than about 4 at a stretch.

I found the book "The No Cry Sleep Solution" very helpful. It discusses baby and child sleep cycles and gives very practical advice for how to get your little ones to sleep better i.e. lighting, routines, signs of acid reflux, etc.

I found that I had to lay down with her and if I handled it just right I could get her immediately back to sleep after she had that startle response. I think she was really just entering the next sleep cycle but I was preventing her from coming fully awake in between.

Not sure if this is your DD's problem but may be worth considering. Good luck!

Deep sympathy. Yup, sleep was always a problem - not for DS, actually, but for me. For him there were different phases; up to about 6 months he didn't nap much [we took part in a study that involved recording minute by minute what he was doing for a day, several times, when he was a baby, so I have documentary evidence of this: at 6 weeks, he slept 10 hours in 24, total]. Then he did get into a nap habit, but his nighttime sleep fell apart and he started waking every hour at night. (So do appreciate your 1am to 9am-10am stretch, anyway - I'd have been so jealous of that, any time in DS's first two years!)

Where you have a problem we didn't have is in that you say your DD actually seems tired and is fighting sleep, so our solution - observe that the baby is fine, focus on mum getting some sleep somehow, and say This Too Shall Pass - won't be adequate for you. Hmm...

I don't know a magic solution, but one thing I wonder is, how much are you and she getting out into daylight during the day? The study DS and I were part of was looking at the effects of sunlight on sleep (he also had to wear a light monitor) and I believe - yes, there's still a news item here - that they found there was a connection. Now, they were looking at newborns, so it could be completely irrelevant for a baby of your DD's age, but if you have scope for getting out more in the 12pm - 4pm band, you never know, it might help. If you can do so in such a way that she gets a chance to explore and use some energy at the same time, that might give it another chance to work.

Good luck, and sympathy again: the lack of sleep was by a long way my least favourite thing about parenting a baby.

[ETA I second the recommendation for No Cry Sleep Solution, but the title oversells it IME ;-) ]

Thanks! I guess it is time to check that book out.

It is very hot in Florida right now, but as soon as it cools down a little I plan on taking us for more walks and stuff during the day.

She definitely fights sleep and is tired. She has been "grumpy" since birth. I think I've figured out her food allergies, dairy and soy, but sometimes I wonder if I am missing something else.

She is a lot happier now that she can crawl / walk / half climb. She is tired right now. I put her in the swing and she is listening to her music and just staring at the window. When her music stops she'll start complaining and I'll have to turn it on again. She may or may not actually fall asleep during this, but at least she is happy to hang out there for now. (What the heck am I going to do without the swing when she is too big?!)

I do feel really lucky she stays asleep at night. She slept about 9 hours last night and nursed 4 times. I counted. That isn't really sleeping through the night, but oh well. Also, I feel blessed on the days she crashes. I generally write and work on my sites at that time, because any extra little noises will often wake her up. I'm not willing to risk doing dishes and waking her.

Oh my goodness, she may crash today. She looks sleepy over in the swing. I have to plan something to do!

I HATED "no cry sleep solution." There was WAAAAAY too much crying involved in any vague attempt along those lines & it made me really angry that this person was presuming those methods would work. Now, I'm still sleep-deprived, so I may be over-reacting

We established a strict schedule, using a different method, it really really really did take two of us.

First, we sorted out how much sleep DS really needed, by letting him set the schedule 100% for a week. This turned out to be 10/30 hours. 30 hours was not an acceptable day length for us, so we decided to fit things into a 24 hr day. We figured out how much sleep was enough for us... 8 hrs, PLUS a nap. It was evident that this would be more sleep than he needed, so we got vicious. By damaging 2 sleep cycles per day, we could add almost as much sleep time as we needed, and by forcing him onto a 24 hr cycle, we made much of the sleep that remained non-optimal, which stretched his requirement a little more.

Ok, that was sorting out the plan. Now the execution. We got him very very very tired. He also fights sleep, so it was pretty easy to keep him awake until he was exhausted. Getting him to sleep in that condition was not easy, but it WAS possible. We got him to sleep. Then we woke him up. Well before he was ready, and deliberately in the middle of a sleep cycle. Rinse and repeat. He cried on waking, but he was a kid who cried on waking anyway, this was just worse, and it was much more manageable crying than anything like an attempt to let him cry to sleep (which is what no-cry really is, despite the title). For months, the last sleep cycle of each night and each nap was interrupted by an evil parent. Sometimes this meant he slept only 4-5 hours in a night, if he'd not been amenable to going to sleep the night before. We were incredibly strict, and we always interrupted the sleep cycle.

Now, I think this was incredibly vicious, but we felt it was necessary, because we were not coping well, and all the "gentle" methods were putting us in the hospital with crying-induced asthma attacks. The amount of crying per wake-up was rarely over 30 minutes, which did not make him really sick.

He's now on a fairly reliable schedule, and we no longer interrupt sleep cycles; at 2.5, he seems to be requiring more sleep than he used to. Apparently this is fairly normal at this age, though not much talked about. We now get 10/24 hrs pretty comfortably. He still cannot fall asleep by himself, no matter how tired he is, nor will he sleep in strollers or cars or swings or whatever. But at least us parents are now mostly functional most of the time. (though still tired.) He still naps, because we can't get all the sleep he needs to happen at night, which is annoying, because I can't really sleep effectively while he's napping, and I can't get enough sleep overnight. But at least we're surviving.

I would not use our method unless you really really need to establish a routine, and a longer sleep time. I think it's quite cruel. But it did work.


-Mich

Dd12 never slept as an infant -- or at least it felt that way. I was an overachiever of a baby book recorder when she was little (she was the first and I was in grad school -- no idea how I did that looking back!). In any case, I don't think that I'm exaggerating to say that she slept in 30 minute intervals day and night until 18 months old assuming that I wasn't lying in the baby book either !

She seriously never slept for more than 1/2 hr straight other than twice for the first year and a half of her life. I recall waking up one of those times after having slept for a few hrs myself terrified that she was dead b/c I had slept for so long. She stopped napping entirely at around 16-18 months and did finally start sleeping through the night a bit after two.

I tried everything including all of the baby book suggestions that were thrown at me. I was opposed to the idea of crying it out but I did try it once for about two days when she was around one b/c I was so tired. Did I mention that I was also a single mom at the time?

She screamed from the time I put her in the crib until the sun came up. The next night was the same. I took her to Target after night two and leaned in to kiss her in her car seat in the shopping cart and she turned her face away from me -- nearly killed me. That was the end of our attempts at getting her to self sooth. I co-slept, carried her around everywhere, nursed until I was 5 months pg with her younger sister... She just had high attachment needs and a great deal of difficulty with tuning out the world and getting to sleep.

If it's any consolation, she's a fantastic nearly teenager now.

My DD rarely slept as an infant. She would have 10-20 minute cat naps during the day.. maybe two if I was lucky. I would have to nurse her while laying on my bed and then slide slowly away from her when she fell asleep. Of course, I couldn't leave the room but at least I got a few minutes to myself. We coslept until she was 6 months. When she transitioned to her crib she would wake 6-8 times per night, making me rethink my decision to stop cosleeping. She was at least 18 months before she started sleeping well at night. She was unable to self-soothe. Now that she is almost 9, I still see how she has trouble self-regulating her own moods. Everything is just intense with her.

The best advice I ever got about teaching self-soothing was from Elizabeth Pantley's 'The No-Cry Sleep Solution'. I am not a proponent of crying-it-out... it just is not how I parent. This book jived with my view and within two weeks, my little one was able to go to sleep on her own. If I ever have to opportunity to meet Mrs. Pantley I will give her a big kiss for saving my life.. literally!