pod week 10
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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 week 10 with my little guy. If you're new here, I've been a sleep consultant for a couple years, but most recently had my fourth baby. So I am taking you along my own sleep journey week by week with little Hank, just sharing how sleep's going, what tips I'm implementing in real time,
and hopefully giving you a quick little tip each week that you can use with your baby's sleep.
Per usual. I have Hank here in my arm sleeping, so if you hear any little baby noises, him suckling on his pacifier, him squirming around a little bit. It is because I am holding my baby currently and he's taking a nap. . So I apologize if there's any annoying background noise.
Hopefully it's not too disruptive for you listening. I promise when he gets older and he's napping more consistently in his crib on like a predictable [00:01:00] schedule, I will definitely be able to record without him in my arms. But for now, this is the phase of life we are in.
Also, if you're just joining us. This podcast is really best listened to from week one. So if you feel like I am telling you how nighttime sleep is going or how naps are going, and you're wondering how I got to this spot with him, then I recommend you go back to week one and listen. I really tried to make sure that each episode was nice and short so you can listen quickly.
It shouldn't take you too long to catch up since we're only in week 10. So go ahead and do that if you're feeling like you're missing some information.
There's not much I need to update you on daytime sleep. He's pretty much doing the same thing that he was last week. He does a few independent naps in his crib every day. They usually last 30 to 40 minutes max, and then I pick him up and extend for the rest of the nap to get him to sleep at least an hour,
of course, I can't do this all the time, and sometimes he just has cat naps. He also takes a couple naps in the carrier or just in my arms. Not every single nap is in the crib or bassinet. We're still in that same spot as we were at the last week. As far as [00:02:00] nighttime sleep goes, , he's had a really good week with night sleep this week.
He was doing primarily like five-ish hours on average for that first stretch of sleep. Sometimes, you know, four and a half, sometimes more like six. This week, a few nights in a row, he went over seven hours sleeping before his first feed. It was a. Magical and glorious and gosh, I felt so well rested and I am just enjoying all the sleep I can get because I'm sure things will definitely start changing next month when he is, you know, between that three and four month range, that's usually when things start to switch up and we don't get this beautiful, uh, newborn nighttime sleep that some of us are blessed with and some of us work towards.
So I'm just soaking it in and so proud of the sleep that he's doing. Does he do seven hour stretches every single night now? No, last night was five hours again, and that's totally fine. I'm still going to be thankful every night when he does give me an extra couple hours that I'm totally not used to. So that's where we're at.
Again, I'm not gonna go over how I [00:03:00] got here. Go back and start with week one and you can kind of hear our journey of how I got him by nine weeks old to sleep like that.
Today what I really wanna talk about is the pacifier. So if you've been here a while, you know, a handful of weeks ago I was having issues with his latch. It just seemed to be getting worse and worse, and I couldn't figure out what was going on until I realized maybe it was the pacifier I was using.
And I decided to switch pacifiers, and honestly, it helped him pretty much right away. His latch got much stronger, much better. It took him a week or so to get used to the new pacifier. That was really hard and frustrating, and sleep was a little bit tricky for that week, but now that he's got the hang of it, his latch is so much better and his sleep went back to his usual routine.
But I just wanted to air some frustrations that I've been having with the pacifier. So the old one I was using was much easier for him to hold in his mouth. It wasn't as good for his latch. But it did stay in his mouth so much easier. He [00:04:00] could like stop actively suckling and it would still sit in his mouth and wait for him to start sucking again. And of course it would fall out like he's a newborn, but it wasn't falling out, you know, a thousand times a day he could hold it in his mouth, you know, for a solid 10 minutes if he needed to.
Or I could pop it in like while I was pushing him in the stroller and he could hold in his mouth for a little bit and stop crying if he was upset
or if he woke up early from a nap, or he woke up early at night and it wasn't time for a feed yet, I could pop it in. He would fall back asleep and it could pretty much stand for a while. Or if it fell out he was already in a deep enough sleep that it wouldn't be a big deal. Well, the new pacifier that I have to use because of his latch is much harder for him to get like an active suck on, and much harder for him to keep in his mouth.
He still isn't great at sucking on it, I have to say. I mean, he definitely latches onto it and sucks on it, but he pretty much needs someone to hold it in his mouth if he's going to use it. This is not something that he can use independently, so I primarily use it when I'm rocking him to sleep at nap time.
And if he's [00:05:00] just fussy during the day and I'm carrying him around and wanting to soothe him a little bit extra before he needs a feed. So it's helpful tool in soothing him and helping him fall asleep, but it's not helpful in the sense that sometimes I can pop it in, you know, men nap, or sometimes I can pop it in if he's in the car or the stroller, or I can pop it in if he's, you know, angry in his bouncer or whatever it is.
Someone literally has to be sitting there with him or holding him and holding the pacifier in for him for it to be beneficial, which is super frustrating.
Because he is sort of a Velcro baby. He already likes being held a lot. He doesn't love going in the stroller or he hates going in the car. So a pacifier that could stay in his mouth is a great extra tool for me, so that in these moments, it's a little helpful thing to have to soothe him when I'm not able to necessarily be holding him
or having contact with him all the time.
So I even got so desperate as to think, okay, his [00:06:00] latch is really solid now. It's been about a month since we went through this. Maybe I'll try the old pacifier for a day and see what happens because it will be worth it if he can still breastfeed well and use this other pacifier that can stay in his mouth at least for five minutes.
Right? Just let me get some sanity. I've got four kids. I'm a little running around trying to take care of everybody and get people ready for school and make lunch, and sometimes I can't constantly be holding him or holding his pacifier in, and sometimes he just has to be fussy and upset and that's totally fine.
It is what it is, but how nice would it be if he could have a pacifier that he could hold in his mouth? Right. So I tried for one day. I tried to go back to the old one, and of course, literally in a matter of hours his latch was getting weird again. Um, he was just doing a lot of like clicking noises that he had stopped doing.
It just seemed not as strong on my breast, and I was like, you know what? Not worth it is this pacifier that I have to hold in his mouth, a pain in my butt. [00:07:00] Absolutely. But I am more worried about making sure that our breastfeeding journey continues, rather than worrying about getting through the next couple of months of him not being big enough to put a pacifier in his mouth.
I know in my head either what will happen is he won't rely on the pacifier as much, which I already notice. We don't use the pacifier at all all night long. He doesn't need it to be popped back in all night long.
Which is really, really nice. Even moments where he is fussy, like on his mat or in his bouncer or whatever, I find that he starts sucking on his hands and he tends to like that. So in one sense, it is nice that he relies less on the pacifier than my other babies have before.
And on the other hand, I know that by around six months, most of the time, they're going to learn to pick up their pacifier and put it in their mouth. Now he's not even, you know, three months yet, so I'm quite a ways away from that, but at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel. At least I know in my head, like, okay,
if we choose to keep the pacifier through this phase [00:08:00] in a few months, he's gonna be able to pop it in his mouth, and if it falls out, he pops it in his mouth. As he gets bigger, his mouth gets stronger, his latch gets stronger, he'll be able to hold it in his mouth better. This is not a long-term issue.
This is really just a short-term issue and it's worth dealing with this annoying pacifier in order to keep our latch. Correct and in order to keep our breastfeeding journey going, because that's important to me because it's going perfectly fine as long as I keep this pacifier. I am a little bit nervous for when he hits the four month sleep regression.
So most of the time it can happen before four months even comes somewhere between three and four months. You may find your baby starts waking up more frequently at night, and I'm worried that because I can't rely on a pacifier, Popin that I will. Probably end up relying on feeding him more frequently than I want to in the middle of the night, or even bringing him into my bed to get him to go back to sleep because I'll just be too tired to like sit [00:09:00] over the bassinet and hold his pacifier in.
I just know myself in the middle of the night. I'd rather him be next to me so I can hold his pacifier in, or I'd rather just feed him so I can get him back to sleep. These are all things I know in my head next month are gonna be issues I'm gonna have to face with a pacifier that can't stay in his mouth.
So I will definitely keep you updated on how that goes. We will see,
but for now, that's what I'm dealing with as your little tip for this week. I did wanna touch quickly on pacifiers and what I think are the pros of them and the cons of them. So the pro of using a pacifier is babies like to suck to soothe. Non-nutritive sucking is totally normal for a baby to want to do.
It's very soothing for them, can help them fall asleep when it's nap time. So offering a pacifier is a great tool to help your baby fall asleep. I like it because then I don't rely on nursing to sleep or bottle feeding to sleep. If you rely on nursing to sleep or nursing for all comfort or bottle feeding for all comfort, it can get pretty exhausting.
It. You can [00:10:00] get stuck in an exhausting cycle where you rely on milk or nursing to calm your baby and get them to sleep every single time they wake up. And that's just not sustainable for me. I know myself and one of my number one rules. With my own children is to not rely on nursing in order to comfort them.
Totally fine with nursing them every couple hours so that they can get their nutrition. I'm not okay with being their only source of comfort. This may not be the way you roll. You may be totally fine with nursing to sleep or bottle feeding to sleep, and if so, keep on keeping on. No habit is bad unless it feels unsustainable for you and I know myself and that is unsustainable for me.
So that's why I love the pacifier because I can make sure they're clean and they're fed and they're not due for a feed, and then when they wanna suck because it helps them fall asleep, I offer the pacifier.
The pacifier is really nice as your baby gets older and big enough to put it in their own mouth. This is something that they can have independently in their bed that they can [00:11:00] associate with sleep, and once they can put it in their own mouth, this is something that helps them get to sleep that doesn't need to involve hands-on intervention from you, which I love.
All of this brings me to some of the cons of using a pacifier. One con is sometimes you are relying on all of these pacifier pop-ins all night long. Sometimes your baby really relies on the pacifier to fall asleep, so anytime they stir and it comes out, they wake up and cry and you need to pop it back in, and then it comes out an hour later, so on and so forth, and you end up popping the pacifier written all night.
And that can be pretty exhausting.
Again, this pacifier pop-in situation can be eliminated if you are sleep training, let's say around four or five, six months old, or like I said earlier, around six months or so, your baby is going to be able to put it in their own mouth.
So that kind of is a short term problem, but definitely an annoying one to deal with if you decide to use a pacifier. Another con with pacifier is taking it away is hard. If [00:12:00] you end up keeping it through sleep training and through infancy, it usually is recommended to keep it until the age of like two when your child can really understand what we're doing when we take it away, and it hopefully doesn't disturb sleep too, too much when you do take it away.
That being said, it's a tricky transition. When I've taken away the pacifier from three of my toddlers so far, it's involved some days of a lot of tears, some, you know, hiccups with sleep at bedtime, at naptime in the middle of the night. Now we get through all of these hiccups and it ends up being totally fine on the other side.
But it's definitely not a fun process. It involves a lot of protests. This is something they've used for comfort for years, so of course they're going to protest when we take it away. And again, not impossible to take it away. I've done it three times and it ends up being totally fine on the other side, but it's a scary thing to take away.
I usually have to build up some confidence for some months before I do it, and then you have to deal with some [00:13:00] tears and sleep disturbances for a couple weeks. But if you're consistent, things can usually go back to normal pretty quickly. So that would be a con of using a pacifier.
If you are dealing with a lot of pacifier pop-ins, you're needing to go in there and give your baby the pacifier over and over again. Here are a couple tips. Number one. Try taking the pacifier out once they've fallen asleep. So what I do with Hank is I hold it in his mouth, of course, 'cause he can't do it.
I rock him to sleep, I lay him down, and then I gently remove the pacifier from his mouth. That way it's not so startling. If it does fall out, I remove the pacifier, I push his chin up to close his mouth and make sure his tongue is on the roof of his mouth.
I stand there with my hand on his chest, make sure he really stays asleep, and then I'll walk away. So this helps with that whole like, ah, my passi fell out and now I'm gonna wake up and cry.
Another thing you can do is play a little bit of tug of war with your baby. So when your baby's sucking on the pacifier, play a little bit of gentle tug of war with the passi. This is gonna really work their muscles [00:14:00] and get them sucking it back in, and those are all the muscles we want them to strengthen and order to keep the pacifier in themselves.
And finally eliminate the need to pop the pacifier in altogether via sleep training. So if you're wondering how to do this, depending on how old your baby is and their temperament and. Your options when it comes to methods, I lay it all out in my four to 24 month sleep learning course.
I talk about how to sleep train without the pacifier. I talk about how to sleep train with the pacifier, which is possible as well. But sleep training's really going to help with not needing to pop in every five minutes at bedtime to give your baby the pacifier 'cause it keeps falling out and they're crying for it.
I've linked all the resources I have in the show notes in case you're curious.
Thank you so much for tuning in this week. Please consider leaving a five star review and sending this to a new parent in your life. Let them know that I am laying out my whole newborn sleep journey through newborn in infancy if they're curious about falling along with me. I really appreciate it.
I also post a ton [00:15:00] of free content on Instagram at Sleep a Alex, so check that out if you haven't already. Have a lovely week. I know so many of us are really busy this week if you celebrate Christmas. So kudos to you for creating all the magic for your children. Try and enjoy that morning with your kids if you can, and I hope you have a ton of amazing family or friend time.
I appreciate you so much for being here, and we'll chat next week.
