If you feel like you’ve been ignoring your oh-so-comfy bed lately, you’re not alone. It’s one of the first things you learn as a new parent. You. Miss. Sleeping. (Yawn!)
Newborns get daytime and nighttime mixed up, so the schedule that feels natural to you, doesn’t feel natural to them at first. But it will. By four months old, most babies naturally prefer to sleep. The problem is it takes them a while to figure out how to do it!
Newborns have a reputation for sleeping through almost anything – a loud restaurant, the TV, running a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer. Then why does she wake up and scream when the floor creaks as you tiptoe in to check on her? Sudden loud noises can easily wake a sleeping baby. That’s why white noise is a must-have in the nursery. You can run a fan or get a white noise machine. Anything that masks loud noises with a soft hum works wonders.
A big concern parents have is making sure the newborn doesn’t wake up older siblings. Yep, that happens! It’s best to prepare your other kiddos by telling them their new little family member will probably cry during the night –a lot! – but it’s nothing they should worry about. This is normal baby behavior as they learn how to sleep through the night. If it happens and your whole house is awake, check on the older kids first because they will go back to sleep quicker than your baby with some reassurance.
In an effort to start making sleeping in her crib a habit, its good if you can put your baby down when she’s falling asleep, not after she’s fast asleep. If you imagine her drowsiness on a scale of 1-5 (1 being pretty awake, 5 being zonked out), it’s best to lay her down when she’s in the 3-4 range. Chances are she is very sleepy and she can self-soothe herself to sleep if she’s put in her crib.
Colic can be a big culprit at night if your baby gets upset because she’s uncomfortable. If you burped her well after her last feeding, but she still seems fussy, Ditamin Anti-Colic Drops are an easy option to ease her crying. Since these drops are an herbal supplement, they can be administered at night and the fennel extract works to help soothe her symptoms. In fact, Fennel extract has been shown to reduce crying time in colicky babies by 65%.
As your baby gets bigger, she may wake up in the middle of the night talking and playing. My oldest son did this all of the time. For a few weeks he would wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. and I could hear him chattering on the baby monitor. I would check on him and tell him he needed to rest because it wasn’t time to wake up. Sometimes he’d cry when I left the room and other times he just continued talking for a while. Eventually he would go back to sleep.
It’s best to keep things dark, quiet and calm in an attempt to train little ones to know nighttime is for sleeping.
