sleeeeeep and crying

The saga continues…

He was on an every three hours schedule last night. I think.

Have I mentioned before that nearly every mom in my moms group is doing “cry it out”? They’re all emailing the yahoo group about it. Trials, tribulations, techniques, tears. At our meeting this week I admitted that I feel a little odd-mom-out-ish. But that generally, what we’re doing is working for us. Everyone was very supportive about it. We love you no matter how you raise your baby. And anyway, Weissbluth writes about co-sleeping as an option, so it’s oh-kayyy.

I do think it’s an apples- and oranges-shaped-babies thing. The CIO moms are for the most part battling bigger issues, like babies who wake up 20 minutes after going to sleep, and mommies who are starting back to their full time jobs.

A smaller subset of our group worries about how to break baby of the pacifier habit, or how to convince baby to take the pacifier — again, depending on individual goals and fears.

Last night, after the 3:45 a.m. feeding, I couldn’t go back to sleep. (Jonah and Scott could). So I got up and made a toast-and-cheese snack and read this article our baby massage teacher gave us that was lying on the counter. An article about crying, by the woman known to be an authority on baby massage.

Make that a rant. For one thing, baby massage cannot stop a baby from crying, she says. True that.

For another thing, she says we don’t let babies cry when they need to release stress.

I remember hearing about this before I had a baby, and thinking, true that. Babies have stress. They will cry. I sure do.

Jonah fusses, and cries. But he always seems to have a point. For example, just now he was raising a ruckus in his swing. It’s a jungle theme swing with creatures swirling circularly overhead. We like to say, oh, he’s just yelling at the monkey. But actually, I’m finding that if he’s really yelling, it’s usually because he’s wet. Maybe he’s saying “Hey Monkey! Will you get off that jungle-go-round and change my dang diaper???”

In the just-now time, he wasn’t so shrill, but he was a-yellin some. So I went over, turned off the swing, gave him a ring to suck on, and voila. Quiet.

For a bit.

And then he started to cry. The cry with a little chuckle in it.

That’s the hungry cry. So now he’s nursing (while I type — how’s that for multi tasking?).

My point is that Jonah has almost never, that I can remember, just needed to cry. He’s always hungry, tired, wet, otherwise uncomfortable, experiencing gas, reflux, teething. As romantic as it sounds, I’m not sure he’s yet familiar with ennui.

And those times when I couldn’t figure out what he wanted? The times he seemed inconsolable? I’d bet he was tired then too. Just he or I couldn’t figure out how to get him to sleep.

Even the needing to be held part has been suspect, up till recently. Especially when he was younger. In roughly the first three quarters of his short life, being cuddled never seemed to be the answer.

He’s more cuddly now. And for better or worse, he occasionally seems to be expressing a preference for sleeping in bed with us, rather than the co-sleeper.

He’s very expressive of his preferences — with his hands. Reaching and grabbing and holding onto boob, face, nose, mouth. He holds my wrist, pulls my hand against his forehead as he’s crying. Put your palm here, soothe me this way.

He’ll grab a finger and guide it along his gum line, pausing at different points to gnaw.

He’ll guide a hand holding the pacifier to his mouth, and he’ll remove the pacifier with a decisive flick of fingers under the plastic shield. Fwoppp!

Which brings me to the offhand comment that famous writer/massage lady said in her article. Something about us plugging up babies’ mouths for our own convenience.

I hope I’m not teaching Jonah not to express himself. I try to ask him, as if he’d answer. Do you want the pacifier? Sometimes he purses his lips quite firmly against the tip. NO. Other times a tickle and he opens up, takes it in. It seems to soothe him.

The moms in my group trying to break the paci habit have the babies that fall asleep with it in their mouths, and then wake themselves up if the paci falls out.

This isn’t Jonah’s problem. When he falls asleep, it falls out. He stays asleep, mouth agape.

What are we communicating? What are we teaching? This is always my fear. Especially when reading a preachy article at 4 a.m.

Scott’s mother says she always played the radio when he went to sleep as a baby, so that she could use the radio as a cue to help him sleep anywhere. And he still falls asleep to the radio to this day, a pair of headphones under his pillow.