Green Options

I’m alive!!!! I didn’t think I would make it, but I did!

Exhausted Mom by Halfmoon Jewelry, Flickr, under a Creative Commons license

I have an eleven month old little girl named Emerson who, in spite of the nurses at the hospital saying “you’ve got a sleeper”, turned out to not be much of a sleeper.  There are worse stories, but mine is a good example of mixing mom’s intuition, dad’s motivation, and a great deal of research to figure out the best path to sanity.

Our Story

Month 1

Emerson started as a fairly typical baby. She slept for two hours at a time around the clock, waking only to latch on for her fill. I co-slept with her in our bed and my husband slept in an extra room so that he could get enough sleep to deal with life (don’t worry, we slipped nookie in here and there). She almost never cried the entire first month of her life. I thought the situation was quite blissful, particularly because I took the age old advice of “sleep when your baby sleeps” to heart. Clearly something in the mommy brain prepares us for waking up to feed a baby every two hours…but only up to a point.

Got a restless little sleeper? A baby who just seems uncomfortable most of the time? I’m no doctor but I’m a mom who survived a baby with colic and reflux. Yup, sleepless nights for what seemed like an eternity, feeling helpless looking at my baby girl writhing around in pain/discomfort, teetering on the edge of insanity as I started back to work.

If only someone had told me…

After four months of Emerson being up every 1-2 hours at night, and taking short, restless naps, and not sleeping comfortably anywhere—with me, in a moses basket, in her crib—I was at the end of my rope. Our pediatrician’s “She’s just not a good sleeper” response was not enough for me—clearly something was wrong. She was in pain! I googled “infant restless sleep” and bought every sleep book in existence to find an answer. I finally found it in Dr Sears’s The Baby Sleep Book.