Monday, October 4, 2004

Sleepless in Reno

For a while there, Ruby’s sleep pattern was getting much better, and Ani and I thought we were through the wakeful woods. We had a few nights where she slept from early evening until morning. For her first three or four months, Ruby’s sleep pattern followed an observable ascent into pillowy bliss, but for the last two months, our family has once again descended into groggy, googly, crankiness. For the last two weeks, Ruby has slept an average of two hours at a time, and won’t return to sleep until Ani soothes her. Poor Ruby. Poorer Ani.

I try to get up and offer some moral support when Ani goes to con Ruby back to sleep, but I have lost the mechanism that used to make me shoot out of bed every time I heard a peep from Ruby’s room. I have grown so used to her crying that I sleep right through it. I think that Ani has gotten sick of me waking up at seven or eight in the morning and saying how amazed I was that Ruby finally slept through the night again, only to have Ani reply, “Actually, she screamed out at least six times last night, you just slept through them all.”
The problem with trying to fix a sleep problem is that if we are desperately tired, it is difficult to do anything other than a quick fix. “It’s four in the morning, give her the boob.”

We’ve tried to fix the problem by regularizing our daily schedule so that she eats and naps at the same times every day. We’re trying to get her to eat more during the day so that she’s not hungry at night. We’re trying to teach her to calm herself in the crib. The only thing we aren’t trying is the “let ‘em cry it out” method. It doesn’t seem right. I know that a lot of people think that babies are manipulative and will cry to get what they want, but I believe that infants who don’t get what they feel they need are genuinely distressed.

I think that one of the main factors here is the appearance of her painful new teeth. She’s got four little sharp white knives in her mouth, and our sleep pattern started to change a week or so before the first one cut through. She is constantly rubbing her mouth and face and chewing on anything within reach. When she chews it is obvious that she is oscillating between relief and newfound pain.

She is also just about to crawl. She can sit up from any position, and then she can lean forward on to her hands and knees. She then inches forward with her hands but doesn’t quite know how to coordinate her knees. Often when she cries out in the night, we find her in this position, ass in the air and one arm or leg sprawled out for purchase, while her other three limbs wiggle and pulse in an attempt to locomote. She looks kind of like a three-legged upturned turtle. Some sources say that when a kid is going through big developmental period like that, her sleep patterns will be disrupted.

Ruby, please learn to crawl, get all of your teeth, and learn to sleep again so that Ani can pass out for more than a couple of hours at a time and I can feel less guilty about the sleep that I am getting.

Sleep or no sleep, she is so beautiful in the morning!