Lego is a delightful baby in all ways except one: he doesn’t sleep well at night. At all.
He’s four months old on Friday. By his age, many babies are sleeping through the night (eight hours), and the rest only wake up once or maybe twice. Lego is waking up three or four times almost every night. If he only wakes twice, I’m happy. If he wakes once, I’m ecstatic.
This means that I’m a zombie a lot of the time. I feel like I’m slowly winding down, getting closer to that point where I won’t feel safe driving or caring for Lego. Even if I go to bed early and take naps with him every time he does, not having long stretches of sleep does something to a person.
Last night, Lego went down to bed at 9:00. I, being foolish, stayed up with Jon Boy until 11:30. When I finally got into bed, I had a lot on my mind and couldn’t fall asleep for a long time.
Lego woke up for his first feeding at 12:45. I was exhausted, but I fed him and put him back in his crib. I went back to sleep.
At 4:00, I woke up (I’m not sure why). Lego was sleeping next to me on the air mattress I nurse him on in his bedroom. He was tucked nicely under the covers. And I had absolutely no memory of how he had gotten there.
This scares me. I have never sleepwalked before, so I don’t think that’s what it was. I think he cried to be fed and I got up, got him, lay down on the mattress, fed him, and fell asleep, all without waking up enough to record the memory. If I was that tired, though, how easy would it have been for me to drop him? Cover his face with a blanket? Roll over on him?
And if I was sleepwalking, that’s even more dangerous. I could have done anything and not realized it.
It’s time to figure out what’s causing Lego’s sleep problems and do something about it.
I’ve heard that some babies take 9 months or so to sleep all the way through the night. I haven’t thought about it a whole lot, but 9 months of hardly any sleep is pretty scary. I hope you’re able to figure things out!
Not that it will make you feel better, but most breastfed babies take longer to sleep all night than bottle fed. My daughter was horrible at sleeping all night too–she didn’t do it until she was about 1. We tried a lot of different things (except crying it out), but none of them really worked. At least after 6 months she was down to once a night or so, but before that she was up at least every 2 or 3 hours. She just needed to eat more often. So, I feel your pain. My favorite book about sleeping was the “No-Cry Sleep Solution”, if you haven’t read it yet. Anyways, good luck. For most babies it’s a slow steady progress to sleeping more 🙂
I had one that was sort of normal, one that slept through right away, and one that took 17 months. So basically I’d say you can’t really go by what is said to be normal. Just keep being ecstatic for the 1 waking nights 🙂
And all along, my husband was insistent that if I behaved different somehow, the kid would be normal. And maybe it’s my fault that by kid three I didn’t give a flip what my husband had to say about raising kids.