Every piece of advice from parents starts out like this: “get your sleep while you can.”

Then you hear about the stories of babies fussing through the night and the late night feedings…

And then it’s your turn…

What’s interesting is that we have had ok nights at the hospital. First night home was ok as well. Both nights we managed about 3-4 hours of straight sleep.

Last night started out similarly- with a feeding around midnight. But from that point on, Erica (e) was fussing a lot, and just would not fall asleep in the bassinet. The only thing that gave her comfort was feeding, but it turned out that the feeds were shorter than normal, and almost on the hour. After the feeds, she would quiet down, but minutes after putting her in the bassinet, she’d start crying again. We had frequent diaper changes, burping sessions, swaddling/no swaddling, etc. Nothing seemed to work. 2am… 4am… 5am rolled by. When dawn came, all three of us were just wrecked.

After the ordeal, we looked at each other, hit the books, and tried to figure out what happened. What we determined was that it was likely an upset tummy caused by gas. The changes to the routine yesterday was that we gave her a little water and tried a soother to give E a bit of a break. All night we could hear rumblings in her little tummy (am I really blogging about this?) so we figure those two items just gave her too much gas. Burpings didn’t work as well. Feeding was fine as the multiple diapers proved.

There’s this book we received from Serena’s sis-in-law, the Baby Whisperer, sort of like the Horse Whisperer for babies. It’s a good book, very pragmatic. We’ll review baby books in a future article as we have 5 or 6 of them. Anyways it’s all about setting a schedule for the baby. Feed every 2.5-3 hours on the 4th day, and follow the acronym EASY. Eat, Activity, Sleep, You.

After eating, you do an activity so you don’t sleep right away. As adults, after eating we usually do something before going to bed. Same principle. An activity can be burping, diaper change, bathtime, etc. (am I really blogging about this??) Then she’s put to her own bed/room to sleep.

YOU mean you now have time to do something for yourself- take a shower, eat, relax, etc.

Anyways we put this into effect right away, and hopefully it means a more predictable, peaceful night. That and no more water or soother.

This leads to another interesting question- from all the advice and readings, parents fall into 2 camps- Scheduled feeding or Feed on demand. Before we were leaning towards towards scheduling everything so that baby knows what to expect, and they play by your rules. Of course if the little Hereford is hungry and it isn’t feeding time yet, then we’ll feed, but then adjust the schedule accordingly.

Which is best? We’re not sure. I think most of our friends are Feed on demand. The problem with this is that we had a stretch of 5 hours where e slept. Is that too long to go without feeding, especially at this stage of life? Then we had to cluster feed for the rest of the night to catch up on the number of feedings.

I’m not sure what is best, maybe both methods work, and they each have their pros/cons.

I will say that E has been a trooper. Amazingly attentive and loving as a mother. As parents, we’re learning that you can change the diaper, feed and burp baby, add/remove clothing, and comfort them with different carries, and they still cry. Good thing we have earplugs. 🙂

Sorry if we’re a bit slow in responding to emails. It was a really difficult night, and it took all of us some time to recover today.

We are really looking forward to having everyone over for a visit once we get a routine established.