![\"Lucy's](\"http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/12\/img_4676.JPG\")
<\/p>\nWe are pretty pleased with the way Lucy is doing these days: she plays contentedly, falls asleep for naps and bedtime easily, nurses happily, and looks _fabulous_ in the clothes I can’t resist buying for her. But there is one thing that makes us come near the end of our patience: Lucy has this habit of waking up 45 minutes after going to bed for the night.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
p{color:gray}. Photo: Lucy loves to be awake. But what to do when she should be sleeping?<\/p>\n
Now, I’ve read about how babies have 45-minute sleep cycles, so there certainly is a reason for this happening. We’ve tried lots of solutions: going in to comfort her right away, “hovering”:http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2006\/lucy-watch-2\/ beside her crib for 20 minutes around when she usually wakes up, doing the “Baby Whisperer”:http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0743488938\/octothorppres-20 “wake to sleep” technique of jiggling her after she has been asleep for 25 minutes. All of these work, but only part of the time; and taken together, they’re quite work-intensive.<\/p>\n
Most of the time, one of these techniques will put Lucy back to sleep quickly or prevent her from waking up at all. Usually, if they fail, Lucy will go back to sleep again if I nurse her in the dark. But sometimes she is just awake, and there we are, watching a movie at 9:30 pm with Lucy playing in the “laundry basket”:http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/2006\/good-clean-fun\/. This has been happening more often than we’d like.<\/p>\n
It is not that we mind having Lucy awake. In fact, it is much less stressful to have her happy and playing with us than sitting on the couch wondering if she is going to wake up. But we know that Lucy needs her rest, and having this late bedtime isn’t good for her. And it isn’t good for us, either! Mama and Papa need grown-up time to be together.<\/p>\n
The few times we tried to let her cry didn’t work so well, although perhaps we just weren’t committed enough to let her wail for a good long while. We may try this again, but we hesitate to go this route as Lucy’s scream-y, hysterical crying is much more unpleasant than just getting her up. If it will really work, then it is worth it to ride it out for a few days. But what if it doesn’t? Then we’ve just taught her that sometimes when you cry no one will come to be with you, and in the meantime Mama got a stomachache from listening to all that hollering.<\/p>\n
I know many people who have had success with letting their baby cry. In fact, we often let Lucy cry for a few minutes to fall asleep, and that works fine. But when Lucy starts to ramp up into frantic shrieking, I become more and more convinced that she could be in the opera someday, if she wanted. Most of the cry-it-out advocates I know either have a) a baby who cries in a much gentler way, or b) a second floor for the baby to cry on. Am I wrong about this? This girl’s voice really carries — with drama.<\/p>\n
Our current plan is to try to get her on a very regular schedule during the day, as per “Weissbluth’s”:http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0449004023\/octothorppres-20 recommendation. Awake at 7am, naps at 9am and 2pm, 7pm bedtime. Hopefully, being on a regular schedule will magically eliminate her 45 minute wake-up. But we are running out of ideas quickly. Any tips out there? We’d love to hear them!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We are pretty pleased with the way Lucy is doing these days: she plays contentedly, falls asleep for naps and bedtime easily, nurses happily, and looks _fabulous_ in the clothes I can’t resist buying for her. But there is one thing that makes us come near the end of our patience:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}