Anyone that knows me¹ knows that, not only am I a mom, but that, although PaperBaby has been a relatively easy baby to care for, we've had some sleep issues.

It wasn't always a problem - last fall, I was nearly gloating in my Mommy's group about the fact that PaperBaby was sleeping through the night by the time she was 6 weeks old. Of course before then, she had the normal newborn's sleep pattern - nurse for nearly an hour, sleep for 2² but since I knew moms whose babies were eating every hour and a half regularly³ I didn't think I was doing too badly; even if I was a bit zombified, I gradually got used to sleeping in spurts. PaperBaby would wake up during the night if she was going through a growth spurt, once she started sleeping through the night, but that wasn't all the time.

This agreeable state of affairs went on for a couple months⁴ - just long enough for my body to get used to the concept of getting to stay in bed for over 8 hours at a time, and to make getting less sleep a real hardship again. Then both PaperBaby and I caught a cold. As any parent can tell you, babies with colds don't sleep well - lying down gets them all clogged up, and young babies don't automatically switch to mouth breathing, and wake up when they can't breathe through their noses. Sometimes raising on end of the crib mattress helps - then at least that baby's not lying flat. But PaperBaby's an active sleper - quite often, I'll put her head pointing to one end of the crib, and I'll come in later and she'll be 180 degrees from the position I'd placed her in. So if I raised one end, by morning she could be pointed downhill, which would make breathing harder...

After getting over an illness, it takes some time for sleep patterns to return to normal. PaperBaby and I got sick around mid-to-end of November. Just as things were starting to return to normal, it was Christmastime. A friend of ours was temporarily homeless, so she was sleeping in our livingroom⁵. So when Tom's parents came down, they stayed in the baby's room, and the baby slept in our room in her playpen. Well, she sorta slept... Wrong bed, wrong room Christmas Eve, I got 4 hours of sleep...

It took quite awhile for anything resembling normalcy to return... Since I'd found that it was easier for me to wait until I was certain she was asleep than to go to bed and get up a half hour later, at one point I wasn't getting to sleep until hours that even uni students would find ridiculous. But she did eventually sleep through the night again, starting at 11 pm. The next day, we got sick again And since I'd not gotten any decent sleep since November, it lingered. And lingered. And moved into my sinuses⁶.

Getting over that bout takes us to less than a month ago. PaperBaby soon moved to just getting up once in the night, and this week she slept all the way through twice in a row! Then I told folks that, and last night she got up 3 times...

I'm sure we'll get this figured out eventually...

Pictures of PaperBaby

Amy Pawloski

11.03.04 Front Page

Back Issue Page

¹Or has come across me for more than, oh, 2 seconds...²Except during growth spurts, in which case it was nurse for nearly an hour, sleep for less than 1...³That's from beginning of one feeding to beginning of the next feeding⁴Well, except during a trip we made at the end of summer to show her of to the family - she doesn't do well in unfamiliar surroundings, sleepwise...⁵Which made sleep training impossible, because I didn't want the baby waking her up...⁶Sini?