pod ep 27 week 5 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 wow, week five with Hank, and right now he's in the wrap and he's kind of like breathing loudly as he sleeps. I hope it's not annoying as you're listening to this, and I apologize if it is. I promise, as he gets better at napping independently, you won't always hear his little noises in the background, and I'll be able to lay him down and record this, but for now, I have to take advantage of these little moments where he's sleeping and the rest of the house is quiet.
That's the biggest part, right? Oh my gosh, week five. This podcast is going to make me sad because it's marking the passage of time so clearly for me, um, which I'm already really, really sad about. There's something about, you know, what you think will be your last baby. Everything that I [00:01:00] do is like, when is the last time I'm gonna have him?
Snuggled up on my chest, you know, when is the last time he'll be in this rap? When is the last time I'll nurse him in the middle of the night? Like all of these things, when it's the last baby, are just, they're really weighing on me emotionally. So this podcast is like really marking the time for me. I'm like, oh my gosh, he is already this old How?
As I look at my notes from this week, holy moly, we go on a rollercoaster of ups and downs. There's honestly like three parts to this week, and a week is only seven days, which is so funny. But each part felt very important that I had to make note of.
So I'll kind of break this week into three parts, and this goes to show you that newborn sleep is really unpredictable and one day can be totally different from the next. So if it feels like I take you on a little bit of a rollercoaster in this episode, that's because newborn sleep is just like that.
It's sort of a rollercoaster, and there's gonna be ups and there's gonna [00:02:00] be downs, and it's not necessarily going to look linear. So don't worry if that's the case for you. But let me just break down how this week went. First of all, let me start with that. He's starting to smile this week, like real smiling, social smiling.
It is so cute and warms my heart, and also once again, makes me sad. I'm like, oh no. He is already smiling. Like we are only a newborn for so much longer. What the heck? But. Of course, it's so special and sweet. And now the, my older kids are getting more interested in interacting with him. At first, he's kind of just a blob, right?
Uh, but now they're more interested in talking to him and he's smiling at them and he loves watching them. So it's really, really sweet to start to watch their bond form over time. And I'm excited for, you know, Hank to be a part of our little chaotic family.
Okay, so near the beginning of this week, as he sort of turned a month old.
I started making a bit of an effort to [00:03:00] stretch his sleep at night. So for the first month or so, really normal that your newborn wakes to feed every two to three hours. So I kind of just, if he woke up and stirred, I just fed him. It's been a couple hours. I just fed him. I wasn't really trying to make an effort to have him stretch his time between feeds just fed.
Any time that he sort of started stirring and making noises and waking up, I would feed him and get him back down. Now that he's a month old, still totally normal for him to feed every few hours, but I would personally. Like to be working towards every three to four hours rather than every two to three hours, which most of the time he is doing.
But I just wanted to make a little bit of a conscious effort now that he's a month old to just give him a chance to stretch his feeds a little bit. Now, I don't mean if he's truly hungry, I'm not going to feed him. So let me tell you a few things I'm doing to help him stretch a little bit longer in between feeds and by a little bit longer.
I mean. No more [00:04:00] than that sort of hour, right? I'm not trying to push him all night to not feed, and I'm not even trying to drop a feed or anything like that. I'm just giving him the chance to see like, okay, are we truly hungry? Do we really need a feed right now before he goes back to sleep?
So how you can do that is a couple things. First of all, pause. I know it is so hard. As soon as you hear them squirming, you wanna grab them, feed them, get them back down, because the faster you do that, the faster you get to sleep. But newborns really spend about half of their time in active sleep. So often they'll go through these cycles where they are grunting and squirming, even opening up their eyes, even making little whiny noises, and then they end up going.
Back to a deeper sleep. So sometimes they're truly still asleep or they're going to go back to sleep and us picking them up right away and grabbing them and you know, unsaddling them and starting a feed is actually fully waking them up [00:05:00] when we didn't really give them a chance to see if they're gonna stay asleep or go back to sleep in that moment.
So I've now made more of an effort to. Hit the pause button when I hear him moving around and yes, I'm tired and I'm like, oh, I just wanna go back to sleep. But I try and tell myself, unless he's like crying out, actually like awake and crying, I don't need to grab him right away. So I give him the chance to kind of grunt and squirm and move around when he starts crying, crying.
Yes, I'm getting up. I'm grabbing him, picking him up, feeding him. I'm not doing any sort of cry it out or anything like that this early on. You should not, but you can give them the chance to move through these sleep cycles and kind of whimper, grunt, move around and then when it hits a full cry, okay, it's time they need you.
Sometimes he goes back to sleep, which is great, at least for, you know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Sometimes he grunts and moves around for 10 minutes and then starts to cry like, great. We just stretched his feet [00:06:00] 10 minutes longer than it would've been. I'm perfectly fine with that Baby. Baby steps. Giving that pause until they're fully awake, fully ready for a feed.
This also helps them get a full feed as you feed them in that moment, because now they're really, really awake rather than still half asleep and really drowsy. And then we're trying to get a feed in.
The next thing you can do is spend 10 to 15 minutes seeing if you can do something else to get them back to sleep. So can you pop the pacifier in and they sleep for another hour? Great. Can you pick them up for a couple minutes and rock them back to sleep? Great. I'm only doing this if it's been, you know, let's say only two or three hours since he last ate.
I'm just giving him the chance to go back to sleep in another way before I offer the feed.
Of course, if he's spitting out the pacifier, if he's crying and crying as I'm trying to rock him back to sleep, these are signs that he's truly hungry and needs a feed. So I'm like, okay, forget it. Let's [00:07:00] do a feed. Totally fine. But I just am starting to give him the chance to go back to sleep in a different way, or to extend, you know, 15 or 20 more minutes before he actually gets the feed.
Once again, if I offer the passie and he is spitting it out, or he is not going right back to sleep as I'm rocking him, like he's probably hungry, so I'm just gonna feed him before getting him back down.
This in the beginning of the week helped me get closer to four hours in between feeds at night rather than just three. So it was really nice. A couple nights of doing that, he started to go the four hours between feeds, which is amazing at this age.
So once again, this week takes you on a rollercoaster. So that was the first few days of the week. We were starting to stretch nighttime sleep, going about four hours in between feeds, which was amazing. Then in the middle of the week, he seemed to have a few days, or I should just say a couple days probably, that he was really gassy and uncomfortable.
And how I knew he was gassy is he was waking more frequently and when he would wake up it would be like. Instant [00:08:00] piercing cry and sort of, uh, squirm and like he's, uh, gosh, it's hard to explain over audio rather than video,
but you can just tell they're instantly upset and uncomfortable.
Because of their gas. So for a couple days he was really waking after only like two, two and a half hours, like instant cry, um, look of discomfort. And then I would take him out of the bassinet, do some bicycle kicks, do some gas relieving sort of. Motions, which I should probably make a video about and post on my Instagram.
If you don't follow me there at Sleep by Alex, you should, because I'll probably try and do that in the next week or so.
So he was waking more frequently and it seemed because he was uncomfortable, he was fussy. I was getting a ton of gas out when I was doing these little emotions with him. And then by the time I'm all done with that, you know, it's two and a half to three hours since he last ate. So I'm gonna feed him and get him back down.
I'm not gonna try and get him back down without a feed in those situations. So for a couple days he sort of regressed a little bit. Um, I think just 'cause he wasn't [00:09:00] feeling well. I don't know if I ate something that he didn't agree with or whatever it was. Newborns are just gassy.
But sometimes the feed would be between two and three hours rather than three and four for those couple days when he wasn't feeling well.
Also, even without the gas, some babies still need feeds every two to three hours. At this age, every baby is different, so don't get down on yourself if you're still feeding your baby every couple hours at night when they're only a month old. It is totally okay. Ideally, we get to three to four hours at this age, but it's totally normal and fine.
If your baby takes an extra feed, you know, or whatever. As long as we've ruled out signs of discomfort, tongue tie, lip tie, extra gas, reflux, intolerances, all of that stuff, right.
In these fussy uncomfortable moments, I am not going to try and push him longer. In between his feeds, I can read him, read his cues, meet his needs, and say, you know, we're just gonna do what we need to do for these couple days while he is not feeling well.
Then the [00:10:00] last couple days of the week, all of a sudden he got past these sort of gassy couple of days, and he started doing five hour stretches. It was like one day he was kind of in that gassy regression, and then the very next day he did his first five hour stretch. The last few days of that week, he consistently would go down, do about five hours, even five and a half hours before his next feed
I will say that schedule has made it a lot harder for me to wake up early before the kids. So when he was having three feeds, his third feed would be like five or five 30 in the morning, which was perfect because by the time I was done feeding 'em and getting 'em back down, it was between five 30 and six, which is when I like to get up anyways, my other kids are up at 6 45, so it gives me some time of peace and quiet to do what I need to do in the morning.
With two feeds. His feeds tended to be somewhere around one in the morning, and then somewhere around like 4, 4 30 in the morning, which I do not wanna start my day at [00:11:00] four or four 30. By the time I finish feeding him and getting him back down, it's probably, you know, close to five. But I've already been awake since, you know, four 30.
I, I don't wanna start the day like that in this. Period of my life at some point, fine, totally fine. I used to wake up at 4 45 before I was pregnant with him, but not right now while I have a newborn, heck no. So what tended to happen is I would set my alarm for, you know, 5 45 6, but because I had just fallen back asleep at, you know, 5, 5 15, I'm in just such a deep sleep.
There's no way. So I would just. Sleep until 6 45 when all the kids got up. So that part has been trickier, but you know, I really can't complain. I would much rather him sleep longer stretches at night, and I know I will get back to my consistent morning routine when I'm out of this phase of life. If I can get it in here and there, great, but I'm not gonna force myself and lose out on sleep because of it.
Okay, so that's the rollercoaster of nighttime sleep that I went on [00:12:00] during week five. I'm sorry that that was so up and down, but that's just how the cookie crumbled this week.
As far as daytime sleep goes, I think I've already said this, but I've sort of clocked that he tends to fight his sleep in the morning and then once we get to midday around noon. That's when he naps the deepest. That's when I really have to wake him up from a two hour nap, feed him, and then he wants to go right back to sleep and he'll nap even longer.
He really gets in a deep nap, sleep in the middle of the day in the morning. It's really hard, which this is funny because most people, I tell them, if you're gonna practice best network crib naps, do it for the first nap of the day. This is usually the first nap to solidify. It's the easiest to get them down.
You're gonna have the most success here. But once again. It's just average sort of fact there. Not every single baby is going to have a better morning nap than they are the afternoon, and Hank is clearly showing me over time. I'm not a morning [00:13:00] nap guy, like practicing my morning nap in the bassinet. We might not be ready for that quite yet.
Over the weekend I tried to do this, I'm like, okay, his first nap is going to be in the bassinet, because I had these things in my head that I wanted to get done. I wanted to do a workout and I wanted to do some laundry. And I spent like literally all morning, two or three hours battling this guy on falling asleep for a couple minutes, waking up, and then I couldn't get him back to sleep.
And then he was really tired and then. I did get him back to sleep and I laid him down. He woke up five minutes later, like I spent a couple hours stressed about this, rather than just putting him in the wrap and giving him a nice, solid nap. And I probably could have done laundry with him in the wrap.
Right. I had it so in my head that, okay, we're gonna do the first nap in the bassinet. Over time, I found that's not his best nap to practice. So I am starting to read his cues and it's good to get to know your baby and what works [00:14:00] for your baby. Not everything you hear on a podcast or on a book or on Instagram or on Google is going to work for your baby.
Do these things give you. Good ideas to practice with your baby. Absolutely. But you need to try them and then you need to collect information. And the information I've collected from Hank is that that morning nap is not easy yet. I'm sure it will be eventually, but right now it's not his easiest nap.
What I've been doing is putting him in my wrap carrier when we're going to walk the kids to school and this process of walking to school and back is only like, let's say a 20 minute process and then I just keep him in the carrier for an hour and a half to two hours. I just make sure we're starting the day with this nice solid nap and this has helped him so much throughout the rest of the day.
Be happier. More well rested. He doesn't get in an overtired cycle. I'm just starting his day with a [00:15:00] solid nap because I find for him that works a lot easier and he fights that nap in the morning. So if I have him in the wrap, I know he'll sleep so much better, and we'll practice a bassinet nap or a crib nap later in the day, most likely around midday.
So I'm accepting the baby that he is right now rather than trying to make him into a baby. He is not,
and it's made the days go so, so much smoother to have this 90 minute to two hour nap in the morning, and then he just is happier throughout the day. Of course, I am not as flexible as I'd like to be in the morning. I'd love to come home and do a workout and get some chores done with him and the carrier.
I can't do some of those things, but I can still have some time, hands free. I can do the dishes, I can fold some laundry. I can do some things while he's in the wrap, so I'm taking it as a win.
That's a wrap for week five. Thanks for tuning in. What I will say is
if you're wondering everything I'm doing to get closer to these four, five [00:16:00] hour stretches of night sleep. I am following everything that I've laid out in my first four months guide. So I will link that in the show notes. If you're curious to check that out, you can either go straight to the guide and download that, or if you join the Sleep by Alex membership, you get automatic access to that guide.
So if you wanna be a member and send me our questions as well, I would do that rather than just download the guide or if you just like one and done, get the guide. You don't need to ask questions. You're more of a DIY person. You can just check out the guide.
But all of these things come together to help with the night's sleep. Today, I gave you a few tips of what I'm actually doing in the middle of the night as far as pausing and this and that. But his night sleep is stretching because of all of these things I'm implementing during the day.
If you're curious about all that, once again, go check it out.
Thank you so much for following along this newborn journey with me. It's been so fun so far documenting his sleep each week. I am really, really enjoying it. And I [00:17:00] will see you next week.
