Merry Christmas Everyone!

She most definitely loves the wrapping paper! Check back later for videos .

Want to track Santa? See how NORAD tracks Santa:
http://www.noradsanta.org/en/how.htm

Of course, this leads to the question, “Should you tell your kids about Santa?” My beautiful wife and I have been talking about this sometimes controversial topic and do want to tell our kids about Santa, in the sense that there is a Santa. We also want to frame that with the story of how Santa was Saint Nicholas.

My cousin and her husband told their eldest son that Santa “wasn’t real” when he was around Kindergarden and he went to school and told all the other kids. We’d like to avoid that. We’d also like to avoid feeling like we’re “lying” to our kid! After all, the reason we have Christmas is not Santa Claus, but is Christ, and certainly want that to be the main focus of Christmas-time in our house. We also don’t want our kid feeling left out because we didn’t tell her the myth of Santa.

I’d love to hear some of what others do with their kids or think is a good idea regarding Santa .

I often get the question, “So ya getting much sleep yet?” The bemused look that usually accompanies the question typically changes to one of faint surprise when I respond, “Yep, I’m getting plenty of sleep, actually”. Most of the mornings to which I awake bleary-eyed follow late nights of my own doing, such as the Saturday before Thanksgiving, when I woke around 3:45 AM after staying up until 11:00 PM the previous eve. I went duck hunting that morning and shot four ducks. Maybe I would have shot my limit (six) had I had more sleep the night before, but that’s another topic for another post.

It seems to be a right of passage, as a parent, that you go through many nights with little sleep. I have certainly had plenty of those nights. After our baby girl turned about seven weeks old, though, she started sleeping through the night. Now, I must note that our scale for “through the night” was five-six hours of uninterrupted sleep. These days it’s more like eight hours. I’d say that’s pretty good for a five month old, especially considering how consistent she is.

One thing upon which my beautiful wife and I agreed, early on, to do with our daughter was to loosely follow the steps suggested in a book called Babywise (aka On Becoming Baby Wise). Note that I said “loosely”. There has certainly been some controversy regarding the book, and I do wholeheartedly believe that you need to be wise and discerning when caring for your own child. From all the people we’ve talked to, and from our own baby, it’s clear that every baby is different, so you have to adapt to the eating and sleeping needs of your child.

What works well from the book, and is fairly “universal”, I think, is the benefit to following this pattern:

1. Eat
2. Play
3. Sleep

The key is to teach the baby that sleep does not come as a result of eating. In the first weeks of our girl’s life, she needed to sleep every couple of hours, which is apparently quite normal. It was tough, at times, to nurse right after she woke up, but we worked at that and it seemed to work well. Note that this is not a strict scheduled feeding program, and it is certainly not a demand feeding program.

A strict scheduled feeding would be that baby eats every two hours, exactly. The time frame would then be stretched out as the baby gets older to every three and then to every four hours. There are times when infants go through growth spurts, and it’s important to recognize that sometimes they need to eat, so it’s really just not possible, unless one plans to ignore the signs that an infant is hungry, to do the strict schedule feeding.

Demand feeding would be on the opposite end of the spectrum from a strict schedule: you feed your child whenever you think the child wants to eat. Many if not most lactation experts recommend demand feeding. One thing that we took from Babywise is paying attention to your child. It’s important to learn to recognize that a crying baby is not always hungry. We know some moms whose babies cry and so the mom immediately feeds the baby. The baby then nurses for maybe five to ten minutes and certainly stops crying. The problem is that the baby then seems almost constantly hungry, apparently wanting to eat every 45-60 minutes, which is certainly more often than what our hospital and our pediatrician told us would be normal for a newborn (10-12 times every 24 hours at first). The baby remains hungry because she never receives a full feeding. A half full tummy leads to less sleep and to poor napping. Constant grazing detracts from learning to sleep at night.

I don’t believe, after our one child, that there is a single silver bullet for nursing, except to pay attention to your child and to understand that after four or so weeks, your child does not need to eat as often as right after birth. In other words, at that point you might not have to wake the child up in the middle of the night to feed him/her every so many hours, assuming that your pediatrician believes that the baby is gaining good weight. Yes, in the first weeks of life the baby needs to eat a lot and sleep a lot, but after that, if the baby sleeps, you get to let the baby sleep!

I’m not an expert on feeding babies. In fact, since we’re nursing our baby, my wife is far better an expert than I am (she did lend me some of her thoughts for this post, too). There has been plenty written about nursing and feeding babies (nursing is healthier for >baby and mom; demand feeding; >Babywise; etc.), and I recommend doing lots of reading and talking to parents of kids that you would trust if you want more info.

It is interesting that this post is about sleeping, and yet I’m talking about feeding. That’s because a newborn basically just sleeps and eats at first. The playtime is mostly watching or being watched early on. It’s sure fun, though, when that begins to change!

The stinky thing about getting the baby to sleep through the night is that at some point you have to let her cry some. The way we did it was to watch for when our baby girl actually did sleep most of the night. She slept five to six hours a couple of nights on her own. Then we noticed that when she was waking up in the night, that she was fine and even went back to sleep when we picked her up. It appeared that she was looking less for food and more for attention. So we went two nights where we did not pull her out of bed when she woke up and cried.

It was hard – my wife took one night and I took the other (though I don’t think that my wife slept much my night either). While we didn’t pick our baby girl up, we did soothe her by gently talking to her, rubbing her, and standing by her to help her go back to sleep. And after those two tough nights, she figured out that she could sleep through the night!

I’m sure that other babies are different, and at times our baby still will wake up at night. We rarely have to get up when that happens. By now we know which cry means we need to go and get her. She’s a beautiful, healthy, and happy baby, and Mommy and Daddy are better able to care for her during the day as a result of being able to sleep. Our baby girl may, most days, be “easy”, but sleeping through the night really was the consequence of paying attention and keeping to a persistent schedule – not the “you must eat every 3.59 hours” schedule, but the eat >> play >> sleep schedule.