pod ep 24- week 1 hank
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Welcome to this sleep by Alex podcast. I am a certified pediatric sleep consultant and a mom of three, and I will be bringing you quick science backed sleep advice to get you and your baby or a toddler sleeping well
Oh my goodness. Hi everybody. I know that it's been a few weeks since I've been here, and that is because a lot has happened in the last few weeks. In case you don't follow me on Instagram, but I'm sure you caught on by now. When I was gone for a few weeks, I now have another baby.
I had my baby on October 8th, and he is a boy and his name is Hank and he is the cutest little nugget, and so I'm just over here in my newborn bubble. I also have him with me as I'm recording this, so if you hear any little, you know, baby noises, then it's just him making all his cute little newborn grunts and squirms.
But as I sort of let you [00:01:00] know, before he arrived, I would kind of switch the speed of this podcast once he was born. And what I would be doing week by week is breaking down how sleep is going, what it's looking like in real life. Like realistically, what does sleep look like? Week one, week two, week three.
And sort of things I'm doing to navigate sleep struggles or to set myself and him up for the best sleep possible.
I am going to include you on this sleep journey with me, so if you have anyone you know that is about to have a baby or just had a baby or would be curious about hearing how this goes day to day in real life, please send them this podcast.
So, oh my goodness. Before I get into the first week with Hank.
I am not gonna share like my whole birth story, but I will confirm that I did, again, have the terrible prodromal labor or whatever the heck you call it. [00:02:00] That lasts for days before the baby actually comes. My labor this time was so weird and crazy and hard and wow, it was an experience. That's for sure.
I'll share a little bit about my birth because I know I love hearing birth stories, so maybe some of you do too.
But I am not gonna get into the nitty gritty details. But basically, long story short, on Sunday morning I woke up and right away when I went to the bathroom, I had bloody show. And I was like, oh my gosh. Thank goodness, the day before Saturday, I had been my due date. So I knew that, you know, it could been any day.
Um, but before that Sunday morning bloody show, there was like. Literally zero signs that he was coming anytime soon. So it was nice to know that, okay, this baby might not be coming today, but there's something going on in there and I'm going to meet my baby soon-ish. Hopefully.
Then, pretty much right away that day, I started just feeling crampy.
I wasn't having [00:03:00] painful contractions yet.
I would just describe it as a little crampy, right? I could tell that something was going on. It wasn't like I had to pause through the contractions or anything. I just sort of felt like something was starting.
So I did a mix of going on some walks and resting and just kind of gearing up for what I thought would be having him pretty soon.
Then that night when I went to bed, that's when the contractions really start. So prodromal labor is basically, you have what feel like real contractions, at least in my situation. They are very painful. You definitely have to like breathe through them. You can't sleep through them. Yet they never get close together.
So they might be 30 minutes apart. They might be 15 minutes apart. You might have some that are 10 minutes apart. Some might get a little closer, like seven minutes, but then it'll go back to 30. There's no like rhyme or reason to the timing of them. It's not true labor in that they're getting stronger and closer together.
It kind of [00:04:00] ebbs and flows in a weird way, so I was up all of that Sunday night having these contractions and timing them and thinking like, maybe I won't have romma labor this time. Maybe this is just the start of labor. And of course, all night long they're like 20 minutes apart, 15 minutes apart, not getting any close together.
And then as morning rolls around, and this has happened before to me, and it's pretty common. When the morning came, they sort of slowed down. So then I would have maybe one every 30 minutes the rest of the day. Sometimes I would go an hour without any, sometimes I would have, you know, four back to back that were like 10 minutes apart.
And I thought, okay, here we go. And then I wouldn't have one for 45 minutes. So that was basically Monday. Monday night I go to bed and same thing, but exponentially worse. These contractions are so painful. Now I am feeling like I'm laboring all night long, but only every, you know, 20 minutes or so. So, there's no [00:05:00] sleep to be had because by the time you doze off, I mean, maybe you do for 10 minutes and then you're woken back up with a contraction.
So I did that all Monday night again, and I woke up Tuesday thinking, this has to be the day I'm having a baby. There's no way I can keep going. Oh, you okay, Hank? I'm like, there's no way I can keep going on like this. This is so wild. I can't believe this is happening to me again. Which it's happened to me twice before, so I don't know why I sort of had it in my head that it might not happen again.
But it did. And Tuesday, same thing. During the day, they would spread out and be random, but they were definitely getting much more painful. Like there was no leaving the house because during a contraction I am like deep breathing, eyes closed, have to go into my like happy place.
In my head I am like bending over a ball. I am literally laboring, but only like every 20 minutes, every 30 minutes. It's just [00:06:00] so random and also so exhausting. 'cause by now, for two nights I hadn't slept and. You know, you just have the anxiety also of like, okay, when the heck is this gonna be real labor?
My previous labors that this happened with, I tend to have this for a few days where they're, you know, 15, 20 minutes apart. And then when it's finally go time, I think my body's done so much work that all of a sudden, once they start getting closer together. My baby is born within two hours, so I really have to be on it when it comes to, okay, they're getting closer together.
Like, we have to go to the hospital. I need my epidural, I need all of that. Um, so it's also just very anxious for those few days, timing the contractions and thinking like, oh, when do I go? Oh, are they getting closer together? All of a sudden, like, I know it's gonna go fast once it's really getting going.
So that happened all Tuesday and then Tuesday night. Holy moly, I think was [00:07:00] like the worst night of my life. I had the same sort of labor. I couldn't even sleep in my bed. I couldn't sleep at all. I just went on the couch. I sat on the couch all night long. I had contractions again randomly, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes.
But they were so painful. It felt like I was at that point that you're at like right before you have your baby.
I was feeling a ton of pressure. I was bleeding after every contraction. And I'm sorry if this is TMI, but I feel like if you're here and you like birth stories, nothing's TMI, but you go ahead and skip all this if this is weirding you out.
So I did that all night long again on Tuesday and on Wednesday I absolutely hit a wall when morning came, and now I haven't slept for three days and I am in so much pain, but only every, you know, 15 minutes or random time intervals. I was just so freaking exhausted and my [00:08:00] body was really hitting a wall, like I just couldn't do it anymore.
I was really scared that this was just never gonna happen, right.
I call labor and delivery a couple times, and of course they just say what they're supposed to say to everybody, like, oh, we really don't want you coming in until they're, you know, around five minutes apart. So just hang in there. Maybe try and take a nap for an hour. Call us back, see if they've gotten any better, see if they've slowed down or sped up.
And I'm like, no, you don't understand. I've been doing this for days. Nothing's gonna change in an hour. I was so. Tapped out, but because they were so far apart, the nurses were like, you don't need to come in understandably. And I am sitting here thinking like, oh my gosh, it feels like I'm about to have a baby.
But yeah, they're right. Like they're not close together. This clearly isn't true labor. This is just false labor, and I need to wait until they're closer together. So after talking to the nurses that morning, I was like, okay, I am just gonna give myself a few hours and see how I feel. Well, a few [00:09:00] hours go by and I feel the same, and I call the nurses again and I'm like, I know I might not actually be in labor, but I've officially hit a breaking point where my body cannot.
Physically go on anymore. I am just so exhausted if I can come in and even just for my mental sanity get checked, and if they have to just like gimme some morphine and rest and that will help me at least get to tomorrow or whenever this baby's gonna come, that will just make me feel like I'm doing something.
So we decided sometime in the afternoon it was like. Two o'clock or something. We're just gonna drive to the hospital. And if you're wondering why I hadn't driven there already, we live like 45 minutes away from it and we have three other kids that need to be watched. So it's not super easy just for us to pop in and get checked.
Um, I know that's no excuse. I could have definitely gotten earlier, but I was talking myself in and out of going because my contractions were just so far apart. So finally we decide to go in. [00:10:00] And thank goodness because they checked me and I was already dilated to a six. So although my contractions were so far apart, I was in true labor and I was like, oh my goodness.
I knew it like this is not just some crampy feeling, I am feeling like real, real contractions. They're just. Every 20 minutes instead of getting closer together. Um, so somehow I was all the way at a six with my contractions still being really far apart. So thank goodness we went in when we did because I was able to right away, get admitted being at a six and I was able to get the epidural and all of that, which was fantastic.
The rest of the labor though, didn't go super smooth. My contractions just never got closer together. Um, at one point. The epidural was only working on one side, which has never happened to me before. I've heard of it many times, but it's never happened to me. So that was a real [00:11:00] bummer and really scary because I was still in a lot of pain on my right side.
Every time I was having a contraction. The only thing that saved me was they were only every 10 minutes, every 15 minutes. They weren't super back to back. Um, the one weird thing is I would go 10 or 15 minutes without one, but then when I would have one. It would be like a double contraction, so it'd be two minutes long instead of like 45 to 60 seconds.
Anyways, this just goes to show you like your labor may not look exactly like they say it should on the internet, right? When you Google it and you're like, when should I go to the hospital? Well, mine didn't look like that at all, but somehow I was still having a baby and I dilated all the way to a 10 with my contractions still being far apart at like 10 or 15 minutes apart.
So they ended up needing to give me some Pitocin to see if we can get the contractions closer together before I. Started pushing 'cause he can't push like once every 15 minutes. It's just not gonna be helpful.
Right. When they gave me like the smallest dose of Pitocin, my body [00:12:00] instantly started going into overdrive and. Having them very, very fast. And they even turned off the Pitocin because I was like, my epidural's not working. I'm freaking out. Um, and when they turned it off, my contractions didn't stop. They just kept coming every couple minutes this baby was coming out.
Luckily right before I had to push, they were able to like double dose me up on some medicine and it felt much, much better. So I had a little mental breakdown, like right before he came out. I'm gonna push this baby out and feel everything on my right side, which is great.
Kudos to you if you've had an unmedicated birth. But this is not something on my Bingo card that I would like to check off. I am perfectly 100% okay not doing that. So I had a little mental breakdown. I was like, I don't think I can do this. The born nurses, they were so sweet, but they, they got the anesthesiologist in there and they fixed me up with something.
I don't know what they did, but basically I started to feel much better like 10 minutes later and they said, [00:13:00] okay, well let's try and push this baby out then. I think you're ready.
And then Hank practically birthed himself. It was so wild. I pushed one time and they were like, okay, he's coming. Hold on, let me go get the doctor. And then I didn't push again and he just started coming out and I was like, oh, I feel I'm coming out. And the nurse had to like catch him 'cause he just came out without being pushed out, which is wild.
I think that's just a fourth baby thing. I guess. Any who, I feel like I did dive into all the nitty gritty details and gave you all of that. I apologize,
this will be nice for me to listen back on whenever I wanna be reminded of my sort of labor and delivery experience with Hank. But anyways, he came out, we found out he was a boy. It was so exciting. I was 99.9% convinced that he was a girl. So when he was a boy, my mind was blown. But also I was just like so happy.
In my head, I kind of wanted a girl, 'cause I have two boys and one girl already. But once he was a boy I was like, okay, I [00:14:00] know this, I know this really well. I've always felt like a boy mom. Having three boys sounds really up my alley. And now my daughter can just be, you know, the princess of the family and that's perfectly fine.
So now on to sleep. Of course, there's no sleep to be had in the hospital. They're in and out of your room I'm like, we would like to go home. No offense to you guys. Really like you guys, you're really sweet. But you know, I just can't sleep when I I'm there and I had already not slept for those three previous nights, and then I had him.
That Wednesday night, he didn't come out until around midnight. So that's again a fourth night that I haven't slept. 'cause by the time I had him and we get moved to the other room and blah, blah blah, like I still hadn't slept the next day. So I just wanted to go home. And we did go home that day. We didn't spend any other night.
And as far as sleep goes, those first few nights at home were really, really tricky.
Hank just had a really hard time settling into sleep. It was hard to get him to go to bed. It was hard to get him to go back to sleep after [00:15:00] feeds. Even in the middle of the night, he was just so squirmy and crying and couldn't be put down. It was really hard to get him to fall back asleep. He was super fussy
and so that was difficult because I had already been up for four nights in a row. . The biggest challenge was definitely those first few nights, just trying to catch up on any sort of sleep so I could feel like I can slightly function as a human being.
How it went was, like I said, it was hard to get him to go to bed and hard to get him to go down after his feeds, but once he was asleep, he was at least sleeping, you know, he would at least go two or three hours. In between his feeds, and of course that's the start of each feed, so we're not counting the amount of time it took to feed him and get him back down.
But basically those first few nights, for the most part, by the time I got him back to sleep, he would go two to three hours before he'd wake for the next feed. Sometimes randomly would pull that like four hour stretch between the beginning of the feed and [00:16:00] the next feed. Okay. But that was, you know, maybe once a night, which is okay once in a 24 hour period to let them do, but really they should feed at least every three hours, even at night for those first couple weeks
during the day, he was pretty much eating every two hours. It seems to be what he likes to do. Um, and then. During the day, he could sleep like a rock. So I knew that with him sleeping really well during the day and then having a very hard time settling at night. This is a couple things. Number one, he has his days and nights flipped around, which is really, really common when babies are born. So if your newborn tends to sleep like a rock during the day, but at night they're up more or harder to settle at night, then you probably need to work on orienting day and night.
A few things I did that first week to help him do this.
Is make sure that I was waking him during the day every two to three hours to eat. Now, he naturally sort of woke up every two hours to eat during the day. He seemed to have a little alarm clock that he would cry at that point so I could feed him. [00:17:00] But I would just make sure if he was sleeping past that sort of two and a half to three hour mark, that I would get him up and feed him, making sure to get as many calories in during the day as I could.
Um, getting morning sunlight is super helpful, so starting the day, opening the shades, getting them outside if you can, , morning sunlight on their eyes. Also, you can do some evening sunlight, low angle sunlight as the sun's going down. This can be really helpful. Another thing I did to help him orient day and night is naps.
During the day, we're in the living room. It's bright, it's noisy. My kids are running around the TV's on sometimes. This is just how nap time is, and then at night, even these nights where he's up for a long time and it's hard to get him back to sleep, I still am making it very clear it's nighttime. All the lights were off except my little dim nightlight.
I have the sound machine on. I'm not turning the TV on. I'm not getting up outta my room, I'm not turning on the overhead lights. I am making it clear like, Hey, I know you're not asleep right now, [00:18:00] but this is when you should be asleep. So I'm teaching his body like this is nighttime. I was very strict about that.
Um, and really within a matter of a handful of days, he was sort of. Fixed. I guess he was settling much easier at night after his feeds going to bed much easier and. That was going much, much better. So this really only lasted the first maybe four or five days where those nights were hard to get him back to sleep.
And then after that, it seemed like he was settling into life on the outside and he would still wake up, you know, every two to three hours for a feed. But I could feed him, burp him, and change 'em, get him back to sleep relatively quickly. Right.
Another thing I'll say about the first week you guys, he did not sleep in his bassinet. Not one time. Okay, let me just say. Yes. I cannot condone co-sleeping like the a a P recommends you do not sleep with your baby in your bed, okay? They should be in their own safe [00:19:00] sleep space. Yes, we all understand that.
We all know that. And the first couple weeks with a newborn is really hard. That first week, I hadn't slept for four days. I cannot get this kid to settle to go to sleep at night. I am like beyond tired. Tired, iss not even the right word. I was delusional and I just needed rest.
So all of the nights that first week, the first seven nights, he was in my bed next to me. That's just the reality of having a fresh newborn. They don't want to be put down. And maybe you had one that didn't mind, but all of mine, those first couple weeks, it was hard to get them in the bassinet. Even when you're doing all the quote unquote right things.
You lay them in the bassinet and they're just like up and will not go to sleep. They want to be in your arms. They just came out of your body, so they are confused. So. All of this was done in my bed that first week, but I knew that I did not want to get stuck like I did with my [00:20:00] last baby Calvin, co-sleeping until I sleep trained at six months old.
I just couldn't. Mentally get stuck there. So I gave him one week in my bed and once he got better at going back down after feeds, I decided to get him into the bassinet right away before he gets too, too used to go sleeping with me. So next week, make sure you tune in because for week two what I did was transition him outta my bed into the bassinet.
So I'll share some strategies I used and how that's been going. Okay, next week's episode, so make sure you subscribe and you stick around to hear about that next week.
The last thing I wanna say about sleep in the first week with Hank is he doesn't really have wake windows or anything, so I know you hear a lot about nap routines and wake windows at eat, place sleep, and all of that in the newborn months, but we are not talking about the first few weeks. Now are some babies much more awake than others?
Yes, but for the most part, your fresh newborn [00:21:00] is going to be really sleepy. He pretty much sleeps all day long. Sometimes, maybe once or twice a day he'll have like a wake full period, and I do notice that around 45 to 60 minutes he starts to fuss a little bit, and so I physically pick him up and rock him and try and get him down for a nap because I know in my head like he really shouldn't be awake more than an hour at a time.
And that seems fine, but for the most part, he's eating, he's sleeping, he's eating, he's sleeping. And that's about it.
This is really normal as long as you're waking them up during the day every two to three hours to feed, and you're doing your best to keep them awake for a full feed before they conk out. This is what most of the time it's gonna look like. Those first two-ish weeks.
Okay. I feel like I rambled a lot. I think I covered everything I wanted to talk about when it comes to sleep in the first week or so. And over the next weeks I will touch on different little newborn sleep tips. Like today. We talked a little bit about orienting day and night. I will talk [00:22:00] more about getting full feeds in and watching their wake windows and practicing independent naps and all of that.
We will cover all of that as I sort of experience it with Hank. But for now, just know that these first couple weeks, I'm not really worried about. Where he's napping. When he's napping, you know, if he is only taking contact naps. I don't think this kid took any naps that weren't on me for the first seven days, so I am just focused on snuggling him, feeding him, healing, resting, spending lots of time on the couch, chilling out.
I am not worried about him being on some sort of schedule or him napping in his bassinet. Of course, like I talked about, I do want him sleeping at night in his bassinet. So after the first week, it was my priority to start practicing that. But as far as all of the other stuff, it's normal that he's kind of in my arms all day.
I have him in the carrier, I have him in my arms, and that's where he sleeps all day. We'll definitely get around to independent naps, but now's not the time.
[00:23:00] Okay, thank you for tuning in this week. This week was a little bit longer than they will be going forward, only because I shared a little bit of my birth story in the beginning, but from now on, it'll probably be a little bit of a shorter snippet for each week. We'll see. Sometimes I like to ramble and talk a lot.
Once again, make sure you subscribe and tune in to next week as I cover week two and how I started getting him to sleep in his bassinet versus in my bed.
And as always, if you would like support with your newborn sleep, with your infant sleep, whatever it may be, I will link all of my resources in the show notes. If you want everything you need to know about the newborn months in one sort of space, you can always download my first four months guide, which while I have linked, and then of course I have my four to 24 months course I will link as well.
Thanks so much for listening, and I will see you next week.
