week 12
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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, welcome back to real life. I hope everybody survived that holiday season. Oh my gosh. We were like stuck inside the house for what felt like the entire two weeks because of the rain. So I was going a little bit crazy, and I'm definitely selfishly enjoying some peace and quiet as the big kids go back to school.
And now having two little guys at home feels like a breeze. It was so nice to have all of that family time, but it was a whole lot of togetherness in practically one room, in the living room the entire time. So it feels good to have a little space to breathe at the last couple days. I hope you are feeling the same way.
Happy New Year.
I feel so [00:01:00] optimistic and excited about this New Year only because I was. Pregnant and in the fourth trimester, all of 2025. I got pregnant in January, so this year I am not pregnant. Woo-hoo. How exciting is that? And I am just like pulling myself up out of the fourth trimester. Hank is 12 weeks old, so that's also really exciting.
Like we can only go up from here, right? People. I am looking forward to this year. There is going to be so much change in 2026 for my family, and it's a little bit scary and bittersweet and also exciting. We're done having babies, which is a big change. I feel like I've been having babies for the last eight years because I have.
And that's really bittersweet to be done with. I am really like sad to never get that newborn bubble [00:02:00] back, and I'm also so excited for this next phase of life.
I so cherish these years when my kids are little and it's really fun and exciting to watch them grow and see them get into new hobbies and make new friends and try new things and learn to like read and ride a bike and all of that is fun as well.
So this feels like a big shift in my identity this year as far as moving out of this sort of making babies phase of my life and into my raising kids phase of my life.
We're also gonna be moving this year, so it's been a long time coming.
We've been in the process of building a house for a long time now, and this year is when it's actually happening. At some point in 2026, we're going to be moving to this said new house and New town. Which again feels bittersweet because we've been in this little house with our [00:03:00] family since we started having kids and since we got married.
But our family has definitely outgrown it and we're ready for something new. And we're ready for a fresh space and a fresh town and fresh schools. And while it's all sad to leave this piece behind, it's very exciting to start a new sort of chapter of our life again.
I appreciate you all being here as part of my little community. I consider you part of my village when raising my baby, so I appreciate you listening and you sending me messages on Instagram.
You truly do mean the world to me.
Now before I get into this week's episode, I do want to give you a heads up that this Thursday, January 8th at 12:15 PM Pacific Time, we are starting January session of group sleep coaching. So how this works is every single month in the Sleep by Alex membership, we start a new group sleep training session.
Now, the membership is for anybody with babies, zero to [00:04:00] five years old, but the monthly group sleep coaching sessions are specifically for someone who has a four to 24 month old baby that they are ready to teach independent sleep to. So how it works is you join the membership, you watch the four to 24 months course, and then on Thursday you come to our live kickoff call where I give you some tips and tricks and things to look out for while implementing your method.
I answer any questions you had come up while you were watching the course. I help you troubleshoot your baby's daytime schedule and bedtime schedule before starting any sort of sleep training. I help you pick which method you're going to use if you need help. The course offers four different methods, so if you're needing some guidance on which way you should go, depending on your baby's temperament or your goals, I can help you there.
And then you go ahead and implement whatever plan we've landed on. Whenever you're ready. Throughout the month, we have more live calls where you can come and check in, share [00:05:00] your progress, get your questions answered, make sure you're staying on track. Of course, in the meantime, between the live calls, you can also send me messages in the app anytime, every day if you want to.
This ongoing and professional support is going to make sure that you are actually successful at sleep training.
You're going to have an individualized approach. You're going to have me to answer every little question that pops up along the way, and you're going to be so much more successful than if you just go and Google like How to sleep. Train my kid.
It's the perfect week to join because we do start our January group. And if you can't make it to the live call on Thursday, it's recorded, I post it. That's totally fine, and you could send me your questions via messages anyways,
Don't forget, you can always use the code podcast at checkout, and that's gonna allow you to join our group for just $17 in your first month. So come and join January's group. Then if you decide to stay longer for more support, great. If you decide to cancel before the [00:06:00] month is over, totally fine. There's no time commitment with the membership.
Okay, this week I'll be talking about week 12 with baby Hank, in case you're new around here. I am obviously a sleep consultant and I most recently had my fourth baby, and what I'm doing is sharing week by week exactly what I'm going through when it comes to sleep with him, and the strategies I am implementing in real time, the problems I'm facing and what I'm doing about it.
I'm really taking you along the sleep journey side by side with me.
This podcast is also best listened to like in order, so if you're feeling confused or in the dark about anything I'm talking about go back to week one, listen and catch up. I've tried to make sure that they're all short and sweet episodes so that you can keep up and keep in time with me and follow along with your baby sleep as well.
If you have any friends who have recently had a baby, send them this podcast, get them on it before they fall too far behind. We can all be [00:07:00] on this newborn and infant sleep journey together. I
what I want to discuss this week. When it comes to sleep is starting to reduce intervention and help that I'm giving to get him to fall asleep at nap time.
Before I explain what I've been doing, let me just say that you do not have to do any of this. Is it okay to rock your three month old completely to sleep for every nap? Absolutely. It's actually expected that most three month olds are still going to need help falling asleep.
It wouldn't be developmentally appropriate for us to expect a three month old to self-soothe and fall asleep on their own consistently.
Is it okay to continue rocking your baby to sleep for as long as you are happy doing it? Absolutely.
And is it okay to experiment with giving a little bit more independence at nap time? Yes. The reason we're talking about this topic this week is because I find around [00:08:00] three months old is a great time to start experimenting with giving a little bit more independence. See what little amount of intervention we can get away with to get our babies to fall asleep.
Not because we expect them to be able to fall asleep independently and take two hour naps in the crib quite yet, but this is a great time to start getting them used to a little bit more independence. That way when they turn four months old, we can sort of seamlessly move into full independent sleep if that is your goal.
So for Hank's whole life, I have been rocking him completely to sleep before I lay him down for a nap. Our nap routine sort of looked something like five or 10 minutes before the end of his wake window. I would go into his nursery, turn the lights down, turn the sound machine on, change his diaper, swaddle him up and rock him completely to sleep.
And once he was all the way asleep, I would transfer him carefully into his crib, keeping my hand on his chest, jostling him back and forth, stroking his eyebrows, [00:09:00] giving him the pacifier, whatever I needed to do to make sure that he stayed fully asleep before I actually left the room. And that is appropriate to be doing with your newborn.
I can continue doing this, but the reason I'm experimenting with giving him a little bit more independence this month is because.
It is not always easy for me to every single nap, rock him completely to sleep and lay him down and do this whole song and dance just for a 30 minute nap, which by the way, is totally normal. At this age,
I am never home. Just Hank and I, I have four kids, so even when the big kids are at school, I have a 3-year-old here.
Not to mention the like thousands of things we have to do each day to take care of the house, take care of our other kids, run this business.
So it would be helpful for me if over the next few weeks it takes a little bit less time for me to get him to sleep at nap time.
And give him a chance to start to associate his crib with sleeping rather than just my [00:10:00] arms.
If your baby is always going into their crib asleep, they really don't associate that space with sleeping. They associate your arms with sleeping, and they might be sleeping in their crib, but they don't really know about it because they're already asleep when they go down in there.
So while he's only three months, my goal isn't to do any sort of sleep training or any sort of cry it out or to expect him to learn to self-soothe consistently. My only goal is to help him to start associate his crib space with sleeping rather than my arms. I'm still going to help him get to sleep when needed.
But we're just going to take tiny steps back so I can start to introduce. The concept of when you're placed in your crib, it's time to go to sleep.
So I'm only probably a little over a week into this process. And here's what I did to start rather than rocking completely to sleep the first couple days, I swaddled him up. I got him nice and calm and I rocked him until he was really drowsy. I'm talking almost asleep, probably like [00:11:00] 75, 80% asleep. He has really heavy eyes.
If I rocked him, another couple. He would be down, but before he fully fell asleep, I laid him in his crib and then I kept my hands on him and I jostled him back and forth. I provided a lot of motion. I stroked his eyebrows in the bridge of his nose. I made sure his pacifier was held in and it was very hands on to help him get from that 75 to 80% sleep to all the way to a hundred.
That's just where I started the first few days. Was it perfectly easy? No. Did it take longer for him to fall asleep? Most naps, yes. But what I did is I set a timer on my watch for 10 minute. I told myself, I'm going to commit 10 to 15 minutes to this process. If he's not asleep by that sort of 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, sometimes, depending on his demeanor, then I'm gonna pick him up and I'm going to rock him to sleep.
I don't want him to get overtired [00:12:00] and I'm not sleep training at this point. I'm just experimenting a little bit and trying to get him used to something new. So I'd set the timer on my watch and I would try and get him to sleep that way in his crib. Some naps were successful, although it would sometimes be a good 15 minutes before he actually fell fully asleep, and I was able to leave the room.
Some naps not so successful, and I ended up picking him up and rocking him to sleep. Anyways, that is totally okay. Again, low pressure, low stakes, low expectations, really just baby steps to get him used to something new.
After a few days, this started getting easier and easier. I could tell that he was starting to associate that bed with sleeping, so he knew that, okay, I'm being put in my bed right now. I'm gonna start getting sleepy now. This is where I take my nap.
So over the following days, all I did was the same exact thing, but rather than being, you know, 75 to 80% asleep, I maybe rocked him until he was 50% asleep [00:13:00] and then laid him down and really jostled him with my hand back and forth as he's in the swaddle. So he has that motion, shushing, pacifier, eyebrow, stroke, all of that until he finally fell asleep.
You can continue to reduce the amount of like asleep they are before you put them in their bed. So next can be, you know, 25% asleep. They're starting to get drowsy, but they're not about to pass out before you lay them in their crib and help them to sleep that way.
Now that I'm a little over a week in, what I'm doing is I am making sure he's nice and calm. I'm laying him in his crib and I'm no longer adding a lot of motion with the jostling. I'm there right next to him. I'm shushing. I can have my hand on his chest with like a little bit of weight that helps him feel calm.
I'll hold the pacifier if he needs to. I will stroke the eyebrows and bridge of nose if he needs to, but the difference is I'm really not rocking him at all. I'm kind of just getting him ready for bed, putting him in there, and then I'm staying with him with still [00:14:00] touch on his chest.
So I'm starting to remove how drowsy he is when he goes down, and how much motion I'm providing as he falls asleep.
You can continue on this path gradually until eventually all you have to do is place them in their bed and say goodnight. Again, what I will say here is this is not required at this age.
Not all babies are going to do well with this, and I'm fully expecting that in a couple weeks he will probably hit the four month sleep regression and I'm probably gonna have to add a little bit of extra help to get him to fall asleep. That's okay and expected until he is old enough and it's appropriate to sleep train, which is anytime after four months old.
I'm going to provide the help he needs to fall asleep and there's nothing wrong with experimenting and laying him down, awake and seeing if he can take a nap on his own.
I'm not doing any sort of cry it out or sleep training officially at this age. I'm just gradually removing that intervention to see what he's capable of. Remember all [00:15:00] of this takes practice.
At first, it was really taking a lot longer to get him to nap than it was if I were to just rock him to sleep. So the easier thing for me in that moment would be to rock him to sleep, right? That's how we end up in these habits, like co-sleeping or like nursing to sleep, because in the moment they're much easier.
But in the long run, you have to know that putting in the work in now is going to be so much easier in the long run for us, depending on your goals.
Staying consistent, staying patient. Understanding what your baby is capable of is so crucial in this process.
Now if you're trying to move away from rocking or feeding to sleep and your baby is four months or older, you actually have so many more options when it comes to teaching independent sleep and more options that are way easier than this can you do this really gradual method if your baby is older than four months old?
Absolutely. You can keep on this sort of gradual train and go until [00:16:00] eventually your baby has the skill of falling asleep independently. Do I prefer this gradual method after four months? No, I truly don't. It can get really exhausting, and the older your baby gets, the harder it gets. Sometimes your baby's temperament really just doesn't work with a gradual method.
In that case, you have so many more options when it comes to teaching them to fall asleep independently.
You may choose to sleep train, which means you'll teach your baby to fall asleep independently in the first one to two weeks without needing to go through this whole song and dance again. If you're curious about this, now is the time to join us this week. We do a new group sleep coaching session every single month, and if you don't join at the beginning of the month, no worries.
You can still join anytime and access the course and send to me your messages any day.
Your baby is capable of better sleep, and we can and will get there one way or another together as a team.
Thanks so much for listening this week. If you [00:17:00] have a moment to leave a five star review or send this episode to a parent in your life, I greatly, greatly appreciate it.
Next week, I'm going to be talking about dropping the swaddle. That is something that I'm really slowly starting to do with Hank right now. So if you're curious about transitioning out of the swaddle and what I'm doing to do that, subscribe to the podcast and stay tuned for next week's episode. See you then.
