pod ep 28Week Six: Sleep, Latch, and Pacifier Switches
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[00:00:00] 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
Okay, week six with Hank. Once again, like last week. This week is sort of broken up into a couple parts because you know that there are ups and downs within a single week when you have a newborn.
The first half of the week I will report was amazing. He has continued doing those nice five hour stretches when I put him down for bed, so I put him to sleep. He does like a five hour stretch in between the bedtime feed, and then the first time he wakes up for the night, I feed him, put him back down.
He'll do another three to four hours before the next feed, feed him, put him back down. He'll sleep a couple more hours. It's amazing.
I feel like he was finding a really good rhythm and routine, and this was becoming more consistent. [00:01:00] Then one day right in the middle of the week, I accidentally let him get overtired. So I'm just gonna share this quick story to reiterate to you how important it is and how helpful it is to prevent over tiredness with your newborn.
So Hank really stays awake like 60 minutes max. He really doesn't stay awake longer than that right now.
And one night this week I just got busy. I was doing dinner and I was doing stuff with the other kids, and I hadn't tracked on my phone when Hank last slept, and all of the sudden I realized. Oh my goodness. Hank has been awake for two hours. He's never stayed awake that long. It was a busy evening and the kids are running around and being loud and crazy, and he is just more aware of his surroundings and stimulated by his surroundings.
So rather than like dozing off randomly, he will just kind of stay awake sometimes. And this was just one of those nights, I looked at the clock and realized, wait a minute, it's six [00:02:00] o'clock. Like he has not slept in two hours.
So then of course right away I tried to get him down for a nap. I had the hardest time. He's crying, he's not falling asleep. He's dozing off for a minute, waking back up, and I'm like, you can't not have a nap, dude. You've been awake for two hours. It's six o'clock. Like you can't just stay awake until bedtime.
Now, that's not physically possible for you. You need to take a nap. But I was having the hardest time. I finally got him to sleep. Pulling out all the stops and it lasted 20 minutes, and then he woke up and was super cranky. It sort of threw off the whole usual routine of bedtime for him.
He was just so done and tired, but he also wouldn't go down for another nap after that little 20 minute snooze. So he had previously been. Sleeping while I was kind of doing the bedtime routine with the older kids. He would be in the wrap on me sleeping during this time, and then [00:03:00] after I said goodnight to the older kids, I would go and put him to bed.
By the time he was in bed, it was between 8 45 and nine. While on this night, he just was not having it. Had that 20 minute snooze, would not go back to sleep. So right after I got the kids down, I just went straight to bed and put him to bed. It was more like eight o'clock
he cried and fought me so hard to get to bed, which is usually not the case at all. Usually bedtime, he eats, he's out, he's done. So he fought me so hard and then when he finally got to sleep, he woke up. Seven times that night instead of two times. Now I still only fed him twice, but he had so many little wake up in between those two feet, seven times.
So this just goes to show you that preventing overt tiredness can totally help reduce those nighttime wake-ups.
As much as you're probably wondering , why I am always stressing all of these daytime strategies to implement that will in hope. Lead to a better night. It's [00:04:00] because of these things. No matter what you do in the middle of the night, it's not going to matter too much if your baby is having crappy days or there's some issue going on with when they're napping or when their bedtime is.
So that was just a quick story to share for you. Prevent over tiredness people. It helps a ton. Now, the second half of the week, we had a little bit of a situation.
So I've always felt that Hank hasn't had the best latch in the world. I mean, he feeds, he gains a ton of weight. It's totally fine, but I've always felt like it does take a lot of effort from me to make sure he gets a nice deep latch and he's on there and he's not like gulping air or anything like that.
That's definitely something I've had to focus on over the past five weeks.
But this week. For a handful of days, I started to notice he was having an even harder time latching. Like he wouldn't really stay latched at all. He was just coming on and off. He wasn't really opening his mouth very [00:05:00] wide, he just wasn't wanting to latch. Now, he would eventually get a feed in, but it would take a lot of effort, a lot of atching, and I was wondering what has changed, like what's going on?
This is definitely getting exponentially worse rather than getting better as he gets older. And then it kind of dawned on me like, does this have something to do with his pacifier? So he had always been using the mam pacifiers, which I absolutely love, and my three other breastfed babies took them perfectly fine.
They stayed in their mouth really well. That's the reason why I love these pacifiers. They don't fall out like a hundred times a day and that's amazing. Like I said, my other babies did fine with this, but I was wondering if this type of pacifier was not helping Hank because he already didn't have the deepest of latches.
So just a little bit of research brought me to all of this information about pacifier shape and latch and all of that. And what I learned is the [00:06:00] man pacifier is bigger on the end of the pacifier and it gets smaller where like their lips go. It's hard to explain this over audio, but if you Google man pacifier, you'll see what I'm talking about.
For some babies, this is totally fine. Like I said, my other babies took it fine and didn't have any issues. But. It felt like this was not helping with Hank's latch. So it turns out that he would be better off with a pacifier that got actually wider at the base rather than skinnier, if that makes any sense.
I've put links to a few examples in the show notes, but basically a more longer cylindrical sort of shape that gets wider at the base where his lips go.
This would help teach his tongue to properly like wrap around the pacifier and teach his lips to latch on the correct way and teach his whole mouth to latch properly and suck properly, which would in turn help with his breastfeeding latch because at least he was getting the proper like latch practice during [00:07:00] that, rather than the improper way of latching with the man pacifier.
Let me also add in here. I am not a lactation consultant. I am not a doctor. This is just from my own research, my own experience with my own baby. So do not take this as medical advice. I am not a lactation consultant. I am not an expert on latches. This is just what I found with my research and personally with Hank.
So when I realized this, I thought, okay, I need to ditch the man pacifier for a couple days and see if it helps. If it doesn't help, then it's not the pacifier. If it does help by ditching that one, then maybe we shouldn't use that one. So I got rid of the pacifier, and at first I thought, okay, I'll just get rid of the pacifier altogether for a couple days and see if it will help him latch a little better when he's breastfeeding.
Well, let me tell you, this lasted five whole minutes. I cannot parent without a pacifier because I cannot be a [00:08:00] human pacifier. I just can't. I am perfectly fine with nursing him when he is hungry. I cannot be the only one that can soothe him by nursing any little time. He is cranky or fussy, and newborns get fussy.
So I caved really, really quickly. But instead of using the man pacifier, I offered a different type I.
I offered the simple Phillips advent soothing the little green sort of rubbery one that many hospitals give out. I already had some of these, and in my research it was showing that as a good option when it came to teaching our baby to properly latch.
Now this switch led to a really tricky few days. First of all, he wasn't really able to latch on it at first. He just would kind of have it in his mouth and chomp on it. He didn't know what to do and he couldn't suck on it properly. So did it help that I could put something in his mouth? Yes. It would sort of like help soothe him and calm him.
But he just really wasn't latching onto it. He wasn't getting the same [00:09:00] comfort from it that he was getting from the other pacifier, and this meant that now when I'm trying to put him down for a nap, he's really fighting it and he's having a hard time going to sleep because he doesn't have his pacifier he's used to, to fall asleep with.
This was a really hard couple days. I wanted to give up so many times and go back to the man pacifier. And say like, forget it, whatever. If breastfeeding's over breastfeeding's over.
But of course these were just like those thoughts I had in the middle of the night when I'm exhausted and realizing like, oh no, am I gonna start needing to nurse him to sleep now? Am I gonna start needing to feed him five times a night instead of twice a night? Like this is where your brain goes when you're in that postpartum sort of haze, right?
You kind of like jump to the worst conclusion, but. I took a moment to think about what my priorities were here. My priorities were that he latches properly. So I know that we were on a good thing when it came to sleep , but I also knew that this is a whole new. Soothing [00:10:00] mechanism he has to get used to.
I took away his main soothing tool and I gave him a new one, so I need to at least give him a week to get used to this before I give up completely,
at first, he was really fighting his naps. There was a lot more tears throughout the day because I couldn't get him to really latch on properly to this new pacifier. He went back to waking up every like three to three and a half hours at night, which is still fine, but it wasn't that five hours that I was getting.
So it was definitely a little discouraging, a little sad and hard, but after a handful of days, he got so much more used to it. He can latch onto it much easier. And guess what? It completely helped his breastfeeding latch. The moment I took away that old pacifier and started using the new one, his breastfeeding latch got so much better.
I then went to the lactation consultant and had a little meeting with her, and she took a look at his latch and said, it's perfectly fine. So I'm so glad that I made the switch. I'm glad that I powered through, but it was really hard and sort [00:11:00] of put a blip in sleep in the second half of this week.
As I release this podcast, I'm actually like a week ahead in real life of what you are hearing right now,
so that's the reason I can tell you that like once I held out for a few days and gave him some practice, it did get better. So I'll go into it more on the updates next week as I cover the following week. But the second half of week six was tricky and discouraging, but I'm so glad I powered through. And in case you're curious about proper latch and pacifiers and bottles and all of that, do some research.
It was really interesting to dive into. I had done the research about bottles, but I really thought a pacifier was a different thing because they didn't get milk from it, but duh, of course we still want them latching properly if possible. Like I said earlier, don't let this freak you out or anything. My other three breastfed babies did totally fine with the other type of pacifier.
It didn't matter for them as much, , but in case you are having latch issues with your baby [00:12:00] or you're just curious about the proper sort of latch and sucking mechanism that they should be using, check it out. Like I said, I linked a couple of the pacifiers that I found through my research as being the ones that most people seem to recommend, but obviously I'm not a lactation consultant.
So do your own research before deciding this for your baby.
Another thing I'll add about this week is I started practicing naps in his crib. So his first crib nap was 30 minutes long, which is amazing. So much longer than I thought it was going to be. So anytime he takes a nap in his crib, it's usually been 30 to 45 minutes now. What I do is I just pick him up and I rock him back to sleep.
After that short nap, I usually throw him in the carrier or the wrap, I mean, um, after those short naps, because I don't really have time to sit in the nursery for another half an hour and rock him back to sleep. Being that I have three other kids, so I usually just plop him in the bed for the first half of his nap, and then I make sure to have the wrap ready for when he wakes up to put him in it, [00:13:00] to help him extend his nap to an hour, hour and a half, sometimes two hours.
First crib nap. 30 minutes. Great.
By the end of this week, he was taking a couple crib naps a day that were usually around 45 minutes, which is amazing at this age. So that makes me really happy. I like that he's getting to know his crib space, even though he's not sleeping there at night yet, I want him to be familiar with it because one day he will be sleeping in there at night.
So that's the rollercoaster I went on this week.
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Thanks for tuning in. I hope you have a great week, and we will chat next week.
