pod week 8
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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
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the podcast another week with Little Hank.
I apologize. I have a little bit of a cold, so if I sound a little sniffly and raspy, I am sorry. It's 'cause I caught my children's cold Finally.
Today I'm talking about week eight with him and.
By the way, in case it feels confusing, the eighth week that I'm with him, he's seven weeks old. So the first week he was like zero to one week old. So by the time we're on week eight, this is when he's like seven weeks to eight weeks old. I hope that makes sense.
Anyways, this week has gone pretty well at night. Amazing. Not as well during the day, so I will get into that. [00:01:00] But nighttime is looking really similar to what it's been for the last couple weeks. He's been going to bed, he usually eight ish, let's say. And then sleeping on average five hours, taking a feed, sleeping another three to four hours, taking a feed, sleeping another couple hours, and then getting up for the day, sometime between like six 30 and seven 30, just depending on the day.
This week, I actually had our longest stretch of sleep since he was born. He went to bed at eight o'clock one night and he slept until like 2 20, 2 30, so we're talking over six hours. It was incredible. The longest stretch he's done felt so good. That happened one time this week. The other stretches have been more like his usual five hours.
And that's totally normal. Things are going to be up and down in the newborn months. Don't expect that their sleep is going to look perfectly linear and day by day get better and better every day. Overall, [00:02:00] do we wanna see it getting better over the weeks? Absolutely. But just because he did that one six hour stretch doesn't mean I'm going to hold him to that standard forever.
Now, as far as going that long in between feeds, I will absolutely still feed him when he wakes up at the four five hour mark. That's totally fine and I will also just love and celebrate that six hour stretch. It was amazing and I'm really, really proud of him for doing that. Uh, seven weeks old.
So nighttime's still going really well, but what I do wanna chat about today is the six to eight week sleep regression. this has really manifested for us during the day for his naps. And the reason I call it the six to eight week regression is because sometimes it's gonna land somewhere between six and eight weeks, and sometimes there's gonna be two kind of surges of it, right around six weeks and then right around eight weeks.
So if you notice that your baby kind of goes through two regressions really close together, or [00:03:00] it's just kind of like all blurred into these couple weeks, this is probably what you're experiencing.
So around six to eight weeks, there's a shift in your baby's wakefulness, like their sort of wake patterns, I guess. And they've kind of woken up to the world and they are taking in their surroundings. They're more stimulated by their surroundings, and they become much more easily susceptible for overstimulation.
So overstimulation is when your baby just has too much going on for them during their wake window they're just taking in a lot around them and. And then when we try and get them to sleep, even if we're following age appropriate wake windows, they can fight it and have a harder time getting to sleep and staying asleep.
This is really, really normal. If your baby gets overstimulated. Many parents find at this age, all of a sudden their baby isn't just drifting off. In the living room at nap time like they once were. So you may find your [00:04:00] baby starts staying awake for hours on end, and then when you try and get them to sleep, it's sort of a hot mess.
Really hard to get them down, really hard to get them to take a solid nap.
This is what I've noticed this week with Hank. I can't do much to prevent overstimulation for this poor guy. He's the fourth baby There is yelling, screaming, music, running around toys. Three siblings constantly in his face talking to him. Like this guy is probably overstimulated a lot of the time,
but there's not too, too much I can do for that, especially if it's the weekend when we're all home together.
And even when I was watching his wake windows, he was just having a harder time getting down for his naps.
I usually could notice that he was awake for almost an hour and he seemed to be getting sleepy. So I would kind of just hold him and walk around the house and give him a pacifier and just do a few things. And eventually I would look down at him and he would be dozing off a little bit. So I'd go, okay, it's nap time.
I'm gonna go put him in his bed now that I see him dozing. [00:05:00] Well, it definitely wasn't. Like that this past week if I was just to stay in the living room and sort of walk around and hope that he falls asleep that just wasn't going to happen.
He would stay awake for a long time and then of course would get overtired and have a harder time getting to sleep.
I would even at the end of his wake window, go into his room and turn off the lights and rock him to sleep. And this was still taking me like a good 10 to 20 minutes to get him down and. While 10 to 20 minutes isn't a huge deal, if your baby is taking 10 to 20 minutes to be a rock to sleep at this age, that's still in the normal sort of range, but it just wasn't his norm, like usually a few minutes of rocking and he was out.
So it had to make much more of an effort to make sure that I was winding him down as nap time approaches. So if you're experiencing this shift with your baby's sleep around 6, 7, 8 weeks, this is typically when I recommend that parents or [00:06:00] caregivers start to do a couple things. One is implement a little bit of a nap time routine, and by that I mean 10 or so minutes before you know that they're gonna need to sleep.
Head into their room, turn the lights down, turn the sound machine on, change the diaper, sing them a song, rock them a for a few minutes. Whatever your nap time routine is going to be. Just pick something simple that you can do every single time that it's nap time. It doesn't need to be anything fancy, whether it's just diaper change.
SleepSack or swaddle and shush and rock or sing one song or whatever you like to do, that's great, but head in there 10 minutes before you're anticipating that they're going to be needing to be rocked to sleep and go down and just start to tone down stimulation a little bit. Get their bodies ready for sleep and primed for sleep.
Try and chill them out a little bit so that when you go to rock them to sleep, it's not as hard and they're not as overstimulated. And starting to set up this nap time [00:07:00] routine is going to be so helpful. And over the following weeks, you'll notice that they'll go to bed quicker and quicker because their body is just used to this routine.
They know it's coming and they know, okay, I am about to go to sleep. They start to associate these little steps that you do with napping and it gets much easier to put them down. So that's one thing I suggest starting, if you haven't already, if you're kind of at this six to eight week regression mark.
Another thing I suggest doing is moving naps into a dark, dark room that's quiet, maybe a sound machine. Make it a circ as you possibly can, whether you have to do blackout blinds and blackout curtains. Usually blackout curtains aren't quite enough, so make sure the room is really, really dark. If you're having a hard time getting your baby to nap.
This is just going to make it a lot easier for them to fall asleep and stay asleep. Now, do you have to do every nap in a dark, quiet room by, you know, six, seven weeks old? No, absolutely not. And some babies are much more go with the [00:08:00] flow. My third baby, he just slept wherever, whenever fell asleep on me all of the time until he was like five months old.
Hank is a little different. I do notice that he does much better if I take the time to go into his room, get him asleep, and put him down at least for a little bit.
If your baby sleeps fine in a bright room, then you don't need to change a thing. But if you're having a hard time getting your baby to sleep, give it a try and see if it helps. Also, what I will add is I have four kids, so I can't always be in a dark nursery with Hank so he can sleep.
So what I do is usually try and do the first part of the nap in the dark room and get him used to that sort of routine. And then when he inevitably wakes up 20, 30, 40 minutes later, that's when I need to take him out of the room because I don't have time to sit in the nursery all day. I have other kids to take care of and he usually.
Sleeps the rest of the time in the carrier or the wrap. Sometimes in my arms with me just walking around, but for the most part, I [00:09:00] need 'em in the wrap
and I also don't have time to do this every single nap. Sometimes I know that this nap is not going to be perfect. I'm just gonna hold him in the kitchen while I make lunch. I don't have a time to do the whole song and dance and put him down in his bed just for a 30 minute nap. I'm just gonna hold him and try and get him to sleep.
Yes. Will he take longer to fall asleep? Probably. Will he not sleep as well? Probably. But these are things that I just have to do when I have multiple kids and you probably have to do it too. So everything I'm saying right now as advice is not happening a hundred percent in my house. Am I aiming for you?
Over half the time, absolutely a majority of the time I am trying to implement all of these things so that I can get him the sleep he needs and we're sort of all over the place like we have things to do and school drop off and school pickup and all of that. And I don't have all day long to dedicate to him sleeping in the crib and his naps being perfect.
So if you [00:10:00] don't as well, don't worry. There is so much time for your baby to get on a consistent schedule where their napping in the crib. We're not going to get there quite yet at seven weeks old, and that's okay.
We will definitely get there eventually, and Hink will get there eventually. I have full confidence that we will be able to do that.
If you are at home with your baby most of the time, maybe you just have one other child, or it's your first child and you have more time to dedicate towards their naps in their nursery, then it can be helpful to do these dark nursery naps. And if your baby wakes up, you know, a half an hour into their nap, which is really normal at this age, see if you can pick them up and stay in their dark room and rock them back to sleep.
Spend 10 or so minutes, 15 minutes maybe seeing if you can get them back to sleep. Help them extend their nap and help teach their body like, Hey, we're gonna stay in this dark room and have a nice long nap for at least an hour, so that they start getting used to this rhythm and routine. That way when you [00:11:00] teach them to do this independently, their body is already on this really good cycle to where we just need to like connect a couple dots to get them to do it independently.
If you were having a really hard time with your newborn snaps, if you feel like you've always been in the six to eight week sleep regression, or you feel like, gosh, they're 10, 11, 12 weeks now and we're still in it. Then please don't hesitate to reach out to me in the Sleep by Alex membership. Right when you join, you get access to the first four months guide so you can read over it right away and see if there's anything maybe you've missed in implementing with your baby.
And then also right away you can shoot me a message on the community and I will get back to you as soon as physically possible. We can get your baby's naps on track. There could be something else going on that's preventing them from napping very well. It may not just be this 6, 7, 8 week sleep regression.
Okay, everyone, thanks for listening this week.
If you can take a couple minutes to leave a five star review, send this to a new parent in your life. It is a really, really helpful, I'm just aiming to [00:12:00] give short and sweet tips each week
next week, I'm covering a really big topic, independent naps in the newborn months, so I'm going to give all my hot tips and tricks when it comes to getting your newborn to sleep in their bassinet or crib. I will also talk about older babies sleeping in their crib as well.
I'll touch on that a bit. So if you're curious about independent naps, make sure that you subscribe and you tune into next week's episode. Do not miss that one. Okay, everyone, have a lovely week and we will chat next week. Bye.
