2006 - The Year in Sleep

New Year's Day, a time for parades, bowl games, and year in review articles. Here on our humble little baby blog, it's time to look back on one of the hot button topics of 2006: Owen's sleeping patterns.

Back in September we analyzed the first month of Owen's sleeping patterns. We've kept up the trixie tracking, and now we bring you 2006 - The Year in Sleep! As a refresher, each row in the graphic on the right is 24 hours worth of sleep patterns, starting at midnight, with more recent days at the top. The blue areas represent times when Owen was asleep, and yellow areas are periods of wakefulness.

So what's happened in the world of sleep since that first month of sleepless nights? A quick glance will tell you they've become a lot more restful. The almost random pattern of blue and yellow from the first month has separated into distinct days and nights. Owen's bedtime has marched steadily back from midnight to about nine o'clock, and hopefully the trend will continue for a bit longer. Those painful patches of yellow between 2 and 4 am have shrunk considerably. An ultra reliable 2 to 3 hour swing nap developed, and was only disrupted by travel and daycare. And, the blue stretches have on occasion lasted all through the night (9 h 8 min on Dec. 21st and 7 h 57 min on Dec. 28th).

Looking ahead to 2007, Owen will keep on sleeping, and we'll keep tracking, and with any luck our nights will be nothing but blue.

5 hours, 16 minutes

That’s how long Owen slept in one stretch the other night. More importantly, the feat was replicated last night (5 hours and 11 minutes) which means that this wasn’t entirely a fluke. Yes, after weeks of hoping and praying that one day our son would be able to sleep for an extended period of time, our prayers were finally answered.

Well, sort of.

It should be noted that this large block of time was preceded by almost six hours of intermittent screaming. Moreover, after waking up and spending an hour nursing and being changed, Owen only slept for forty-five minutes before waking up again (it took another forty minutes to get him back down). This pattern was also largely repeated last night. In an ideal world, Owen would sleep for five hours and then go back down for three to four hours. However, we recognize that that’s asking an awful lot from a five week old and isn’t the source of our ambivalence regarding this latest development.

It’s my breast.

Apparently, my body got used to Owen nursing every three hours or so and adjusted my milk production accordingly. As a result, about four hours into Owen’s slumber, I awoke in agony. The additional passage of time between feedings has resulted not only in the engorgement of my breast, but also blocked milk ducts. Those unfamiliar with this phenomenon, imagine hard, large painful cyst in your chest.

If left untreated, blocked milk ducts can result in mastitis which can in turn lead to a bacterial infection (and you don’t want a bacterial infection in your breasts). The stated remedy to blocked ducts is frequent feedings. However, this would entail waking our little one from a peaceful and hard-fought sleep in order to force feed him, which goes against everything we’ve been striving for the past few weeks.

What's the moral of our little story here? When it comes to newborns and monkey paws, be careful what you wish for.

One Month of Sleepless Nights

One month ago today, Owen was born. It's a bit hard for us to believe that he's already a month old (and not one of those short months, but a full 31 days), but it's also hard to remember what life was like without him (of course that might be due to the memory loss associated with sleep deprivation). One hazy memory I do have from those days before Owen arrived were glorious nights sleeping for seven, eight, sometimes even nine hours in a row. Now for Elaine, those are even more distant memories as the pressure Owen put on her bladder prevented a full night's sleep long before his crying ever did.

In the months leading up to Owen's birth, the one part of being a new parent that terrified me the most was the lack of sleep associated with having a newborn. The prospect of mountains of diapers didn't particularly phase me, and the endless hours of breast feeding were and are a challenge that I am particularly unsuited to help with, but the idea of not getting my precious eight hours of sleep left me shaking in my shoes. Some of our friends with kids would tell us almost nonchalantly how little sleep they got the first few months, and I would wonder if their calmness about it all was a ploy to trick more people into joining them in the ranks of the breeders, or if the lack of sleep they experienced actually prevented them from forming any long term memories about just how bad it was.

Now that we're a month into this parenthood experience, it's time to face my fear, and look back on a month of sleepless nights. For various reasons, we've been a bit obsessive about tracking Owen's sleeping habits (when two economists have a baby, they're bound to collect some data;-). The chart below is a visual representation of Owen's sleep patterns to date. The blue areas represent periods of sleep, and the yellow areas are times when he is awake.


It looks like a lot of work, but thanks to a wonderful web application called the TrixieTracker (which grew out of great blog called the The Trixie Update), it's actually incredibly easy to keep track of Owen's every move. What have we learned from all this data? So far, mostly that Owen's sleep pattern looks pretty random, but there are a few encouraging bits of information buried in the data. He's been sleeping about 11 hours a day, and thankfully his naps last longer during the night than they do during the day. If we ignore all the really short naps that don't give us parents enough time to do anything, his real naps during the day average a little less than 90 minutes, and at night they tend to last a little over two hours. On eight separate blissful occasions, he's slept for about four hours in a single stretch at night; but there have been 31 times where he's fallen asleep at night and been back up within half an hour. Despite all of our attempts, we haven't yet been able find any ways to influence whether he'll sleep well at night or not.

How has reality stacked up against my initial fears? Well, I think I'm doing all right. The first few weeks were a little rough, but adrenaline and afternoon naps help out quite a bit. Now that I'm back at work, Elaine has been absolutely wonderful and taken over all the changing and calming duties in the middle of the night on work days. I try to return the favor on weekends changing him in the middle of the night and taking him downstairs early in the morning so Elaine can sleep in, but she still has to get up to nurse, so there is only so much I can do.

Hopefully, before too long we'll start to see some patterns develop in the data, and when we start to have some influence on when he goes to sleep, having the data will be great for managing transitions in bed times and nap times. In a few months we might start to see Owen sleeping through the night, and eventually developing a stable nap pattern. Until then, we'll keep on tracking, and dreaming of the night when we can dream again.

In My Dreams...

I dream of crying babies, and they've invaded Elaine's dreams as well. In those blissful few moments after Owen has finally drifted off to sleep, what does my exhausted mind choose to subject me to? More crying, and the crying is accompanied by strange abstract images that don't specifically resemble babies, but give the distinct impression of a baby's movement just as it startles itself and begins the jerky arm and leg movements that accompany a crying jag.

Now this has happened to me before, not so much with the babies, but with Edgeworth boxes and separating hyperplanes. The summer after my first year in grad school, when I was studying 18 hours a day for my micro and macro comps, the equations and formulas that filled my days also permeated my dreams. (Also, for a short time during my third year in grad school, thanks to Bill and John, all my dreams were about Quake, but that's another story).

What surprises me about the latest set of dreams is that for the most part, my days are not filled with crying babies. So far, thankfully, Owen hasn't been very colicky. Most of his crying has been of the "I'm hungry", "I'm wet", "I'm poopy", "I need to be burped", "I want to be held", or "I want to feel like I'm back in the womb" varieties. Figure out what he wants, satisfy his needs, and he's happy again. Occasionally though, he cries for reasons I can't decipher, and that can leave quite an impression on your mind, particularly when it happens at 3 am.

From an evolutionary perspective, we're all programmed to find our infants adorable and to hark to their every cry. They're relatively helpless in this world, and if we didn't jump at their every cry, they'd end up starving and we'd be eaten by the lions. So when he drifts off to sleep, and I begin to follow, it's not a contentedly sleeping baby that joins me in my dreams, but the cry that calls me to action.

Suckers

The mantra of lactation consultants is that one must avoid nipple confusion at all costs, at least in the case of newborns. This means that the introduction of bottles, pacifiers and any other objects other than the mother’s breast designed to be placed in your child’s mouth to stop them from crying are strongly frowned upon. No one really says what the repercussions of being nipple confused is, but the implication is no good and will invariably involve some sort of therapy in adulthood.

Now we really want Owen to have nipple clarity and had decided that we would not introduce a pacifier for at least one month and delay introducing a bottle until sometime after that, but then came his third night home from the hospital. For reasons that still elude us, Owen decided that the hours between midnight and four in the morning should be spent either breast feeding or screaming. We tried walking. We tried swaddling. We tried rocking. We tried singing. We tried various combinations of all of these and nothing seemed to help. Finally, at 3:30 am Elaine decided to go boil a pacifier. Allen wanted to hold off and desperately searched on-line for some alternative remedy, but by the time Elaine returned with the sterilized pacifier Allen had given up and offered the forbidden fruit to our son.

Which he summarily and immediately rejected.

To be honest, we hadn’t considered that as a possible outcome. The pacifier was our nuclear option which would insure peace but may also involve quite a bit of fallout. Having weighed the pros and cons and decided to go for it, we just assumed it would work. As our son spit it out and continued to wail and scream we just looked at each other, horrified, and contemplating what to do next.

Eventually, Owen fell asleep and we got a few hours as well. The next day we wondered about our folly and what it said about us as parents that we had caved so quickly and to no purpose. Allen called his friend Nabeel who has a 1 ½ year old and asked his opinion about pacifiers. While Nabeel maintained they held out for three weeks (though his wife Megan called the next day and corrected him that the initial introduction was more like five days) their philosophy was that given you can’t boil their fingers, a sterilized pacifier isn’t the worst thing in the world.