We stuck to our plan, more or less, and enrolled in a seminar for parents of older babies who sleep poorly. I never got around to doing the internet research or ringing the parent help line – I didn’t have time and it isn’t practical when you only have one arm free. But we did make it to the sleep seminar.
There were three other couples and two mothers without their partners there, two facilitators who were child and maternal health nurses, and us. The main facilitator began by noting that in many cultures, babies sleep with their parents into childhood, and that it can be helpful just to know that it’s normal for older babies to wake periodically, and many do. We all had to introduce ourselves and outline what the problem was with our babies and what was our objective when it came to their sleep.
I felt sorry for the American couple whose baby slept like an angel at childcare but who at home woke every hour after 8.30pm. I could relate to the mixed feelings of the mother whose son slept with her in their double bed while her husband slept alone in another room – she enjoyed sleeping with her son but felt that it wasn’t fair on her husband and she should try to break the habit. I was glad I wasn’t the couple whose baby thought it was time to get up at 4.30am, who then stayed awake for a couple of hours. But I felt complete relief that our situation wasn’t as bad as that of one young mother, who was clearly much younger than the rest of us and sat quietly in her chair until it was her turn to speak.
She said that she had another child who is four, who had not been a great sleeper, but compared to her baby, the older one had been no problem at all. Her baby had never taken a dummy and (at 10 months) fed ‘between five and ten times a night’. She was unable to sleep, day or night, unless she was being cuddled or fed by her mother. Anyone else, including her father, and she screamed. Whenever anything was wrong she would only settle if she was breastfed.
– ‘If she’s hungry. . . she wants my boob. If she’s grizzly. . . she wants my boob. She wants to sleep. . . my boob. She’s not happy unless she has it. She wakes in the night constantly. I end up sleeping with her but it’s not sleeping because I wake up so often that it’s like I never switch off and rest. I’m completely exhausted. I don’t know what to do, to be honest. I’d be happy if I just had to get up to her three or four times a night. It’s completely out of control. My partner and I haven’t been out together for more than 2 years – I was pregnant and then the baby was born and I can never leave her. Even now she’s with her father and I’m wondering if she’s screaming. . . We want to go out, but at this rate we’ll be able to go out together (she looked at her watch as if checking her diary) for another 2 years.’
I felt sorry for her but giggled like a teenager then tried to cover up my inappropriate response. It was the word ‘boob’. Not a word I usually use, and there is something inherently ridiculous about it. And she kept saying it. Boob. Boob. Boob. Or perhaps I was just tired.
I wasn’t sure what to say when it was our turn. Although I had kept a diary of the babies’ sleep issues for the last few months, I hadn’t referred to it before the class and I had trouble articulating a coherent story about what had been going on. What exactly was our problem, what weren’t we happy with and what was OK, and how long had a given pattern occurred before a new one took over? I was still trying to prepare my thoughts as others spoke.
I managed to explain that we had twins who had slept well for the first 6 months, then we had gone away with them and they had had ongoing sicknesses and their sleep had deteriorated. They had never slept for long in the day, and we didn’t mind that, but now they weren’t going to bed until 9 or 10pm and were both waking every couple of hours. We had been taking them in to bed with us and were sleeping with one or two babies in our bed most nights as a result. Our goal was for them to go to bed at around 7.30pm and sleep through the night in their own cots. I also explained that our plan to get them tired out for night sleeping was to try to get them to have a long sleep in the middle of the day and not sleep later than 3 in the afternoon. To achieve this I proposed giving them a short rest if they fell asleep in their highchairs at breakfast (as had sometimes been occurring) and waking them up in the afternoon so they didn’t sleep too long.
The nurse looked like she was struggling to take in all the facets of our problematic behaviour. ‘So you put them to sleep in their highchairs?’
Discussing the co-sleeping, Steve said that he liked sleeping with the babies but recognised that it wasn’t a good thing long-term. When asked how we ensured that they weren’t smothered by the doona, I said that I wasn’t too worried about that as the babies seemed to be able to push bedding away if they felt it was smothering. The nurse took the opportunity to raise the issue of co-sleeping and its risks for SIDS and we had a group discussion about this.
Time was getting on and the nurses were obviously keen to move on to a discussion about ways forward for everyone’s issues. We were shown a short DVD that explained how babies, like adults, have periods of heavy sleep in which they grow and periods of lighter sleep in which they dream and process the events of the day. These periods are more pronounced in babies. The DVD also demonstrated recommended settling techniques like brief comforting and slow patting. Then the facilitator asked everyone to think about what they thought they could do differently to address their issues.
The American couple would try the settling techniques. The couple with the baby who was up for the day at 4.30am would remove the night feeds but they were happy to let him get up that early if his night waking improved. The mother who co-slept with her son was not sure she was ready to change the habit. And we thought we’d settle the babies in their room rather than in our arms, and would try for a week or two to no longer bring them in to bed with us at night.
We all went home to our respective lives. ‘Thank goodness I don’t have babies who are like limpets and need me all the time,’ I thought. ‘Thank goodness we don’t have twins,’ the others must have thought.
And that’s the beauty of a group like that, isn’t it. Apart from the advice and the opportunity to be heard, you always find someone worse off than you are.
And that makes you feel a little more able to cope.
