it’s a valentine’s sleep-miracle

It’s evening. Husband is out doing errands, due back at 7. He’d come home at 5:30, rocked the boy down to napping before leaving at 6, and the boy woke up again not 10 minutes later. Crying. I tried rocking him. Changing him. Then nursing him. Bingo on the third option. Put him over my shoulder to burp him and he burps; copious spit-up oozes down my back for the -nth time today. He’s crying again. I swaddle him, put paci in his mouth, jiggle. It’s not working.

Suddenly, my brain is in free fall. I can’t do this. Why does he spit up so much? Something must be wrong with him. We’re crying together, again.

This has to stop.

Desperation/inspiration: I take swaddled, stiff, capsule-shaped screaming baby into nursery, replace pacifier in his mouth, place him in crib under mobile, wind it up, walk away. Because I need to walk away. Take a breath.

Suddenly, it’s quiet.

Within minutes, husband walks in. We check nursery. Boy is asleep.

I accidentally did something that one of those sleep books talked about — and it worked.

Miracle.

* * *

He also fell asleep on his own on my lap during moms group today. It looked like this:

* * *

I don’t want to jinx it, but over the last few days, the boy actually seems to be shifting himself to the sort-of traditional sleep schedule: Down at 7, up around 9 to nurse and be diapered, down again for about 5 hours, up for nurse/diaper, down again for 3 more hours — 11 hours total, with a decent nap again 2 hours later around 8 a.m.

I still like giving him baths and massage in the morning, so not sure when that will become part of his bedtime routine. We’ll see.

The nice thing about having a moms group is, for example: Today at lunch I learned I’m not the only mom who isn’t immediately cottoning on to this bedtime bath routine thing. Nice to not be alone in this.

* * *

“What happens in a moms group?” my mother asks me.

“We sit in a circle and talk about stuff. And then we go on outings together.”

What does happen in a moms group?

We meet in a large, empty, carpeted room, inside a church. We sit in a circle, on the floor, with backjacks for support and pillows with freshly laundered pillowcases for supporting the babies while nursing, napping. There is water in paper cups and snacks on paper plates: graham crackers, rice cracker mix, animal crackers, trail mix with m&ms.

We go around the circle, one at a time, and say one high point and one low (roughly one, some of us say more) of the week. We have a moderator, who is a trained lactation consultant and babycare educator and a mother of three. She listens to our check-ins and picks a topic from that for the group to discuss, offering expert advice as warranted, and sometimes asking more questions to delve deeper into a subject.

Today, for example, we mainly talked about bottle feeding (how to, how much) and pumping. She gave us advice on how to help baby not gulp the milk down from a bottle, how to give him time to breathe, catch up, and get his suck-suck-suck needs met — because the sucking is as important as the food consumption for baby’s growth and brain development. This is one of the reasons baby can overeat on the bottle, because he will continue sucking in order to get his suck needs met, even if it means filling his tummy to bursting.

Turns out you hold baby sitting upright, hold bottle level with the floor (studies have shown this does not cause excessive air intake after all, she said), take bottle out every 12 sucks, rest nipple on upper lip, let baby take it back in on his own, repeat.

Some subset of the group usually goes out for lunch after. Today we went to a traditional-style Mexican restaurant which was fortunately nearly empty, and carpeted — oh, the quiet; delightful! Well, quiet except for the noise we and ours were making, of course. The woman who’d been shy to BF in public on Friday was bolder today, made her move, succeeded.

It really helps to do this first-time or almost first-time public babycare stuff in a pack.