Last night, Daphne “slept” 11.5 hours.  I put her down at 9 or so, and headed to bed with Jason taking the first shift.  Or so we thought.  She had been fairly consistent in doing two stretches of longer sleep in the night – not necessarily consistent in length or when they’d happen, but two stints through the night with one feed in the middle.  Jason would take the first one, because she generally is awake a bit after eating, so that I could go to bed and maximize my sleep.

Last night, he brought her in, in the bouncer she’s been sleeping in, at 2am, still asleep.  Ok.  That’s somewhat surprising.  I waited for her to wake up at any moment for food (she’d woken at 2am or thereabouts a number of times.)  But it didn’t happen.  And at 5am, after being up for an hour wondering if her shifting and fussing in the night would lead to her waking up to eat, I got up and pumped to relieve the excessively full feeling in my breasts.  Nearly 9oz later, I went to bed, and she didn’t get up until 8:40am.

So, here I am with far less full breasts than usual.  She wasn’t still hungry after eating at 8:45am, but did she get as much as she really wanted?  She ate again and hour and a half later, three hours after that, and two hours after that.  I think she doesn’t know what to do with this change.  She had a horrid time napping during the day as well, with neither of us being able to figure out how to pattern the eating and the sleeping together.  And then she had a long nap during class, and went down for the night later than usual.  I’m curious just how long it’s going to take to figure it all out.

Of course, I don’t expect her to repeat this performance for a while – and indeed she did not sleep through the night this morning (getting up at 3:30am to eat).  But hopefully, her body and brain will process that it’s a good idea to do it again some time soon. 😛

I didn’t expect it, but the sleep approach seems to be our first (likely of plenty) parenting disagreements.  I’m trying to not let Daphne go more than an hour or two between naps, and will start putting her down at very early and mild sleep signs.  But Jason thinks I’m just going to be spending all my time trying to put her to sleep.  Of course, I feel like he usually tries to get her to sleep when she’s overtired, and hence it takes him longer.  (Or, he gives her to me after she’s been up too long and I have to take 45 minutes to get her down.)

I’d feel more inclined to listen to what he has to say equally weighted if he did any reading/research on sleep in infants, or if he experimented more with putting her down as often as I do.  But honestly, he just says “I don’t like this plan because I’m concerned you’ll be spending your whole day feeding her for 20 minutes, playing with her for 20 minutes, then trying to put her down for 90.”  He neither offers an alternative approach nor takes into consideration the fact I’m not going to try to put her down for 90 minutes.  (I think the longest I’ve taken so far is 50.  That was unusual.)

I really wish he’d read some of the books I got which I asked him to read two weeks ago, but I think that’s just another sign of our parenting approaches – he’s much more “go with whatever”, including not really asking people with more experience (anyone with a kid!) about their journey through this (or other) issues.  He seems to think what we have is working well enough, and with both of us sleep deprived and cranky, it’s taking more effort that usual to remember to “argue” productively and nicely.  Oh, I know we’ll figure it out, but it’s definitely a frustrating process.

The sleep project is going.  With the two of us not on the same page, it’s hard to get a good feel for how well it’s working, and the heat wave we recently had didn’t make it any easier for Daphne to sleep.  I do think that her getting more sleep has been helping, but I don’t think she’s really going to be a 15hr/day three month old.  Perhaps 13.5 or so.  My intuition is that she’s got a pattern (schedule, if you will) that fits her best.  Neither of us want to parent on a schedule, but she seems to do best on days that follow a similar schedule.  Now that I’m living it, I understand why parents put their babies on schedules.  I’m not prepared to go that far, and I certainly don’t think Jason is, but I’m going to see if we can encourage something that is loosely similar day to day.

We are, though, getting more smiles, and some vocal laughing.  She’s not able to reach things yet, and has just taken to staring at her feet, but she’s got almost a completely stable head when she holds it up.  Oh, she gets tired and it droops, but she’s not a bobble head any more.

Daphne had her two month doctor visit yesterday, which meant her first shots.  We opted not to get the HepB vaccine when she was born (the birth center doesn’t offer it, and we didn’t take her in to have it done right away), and are going to continue delaying that one for a while, as it is not one of the vaccines that needs to be given by a particular age.  (And we don’t forsee her doing IV drugs or having random sex any time really soon.)  We also passed on the new rotavirus vaccine, as she is not at any particular risk for it – it’s neither winter, nor is she in daycare or around a lot of other kids.  But she got the rest of them – DTaP (diptheria, tetnus, pertussis), IPV (inactivated polio), Hib (haemophelia influenza b), and Prevnar (pneumococcal).

It was not pleasant to watch that process.  She woke up just before we had to leave for our appointment, and was quite hungry when we arrived.  That ought to have been fabulous, since nursing during the shots can help.  Only doctors visits often take rather a long time.  So, I nursed her on one side in the waiting room (and managed to mostly successfully walk to the exam  room with her still hooked up.  I waited to go to the other side until they were ready to do the shots, but we had to do the heart/lung check, weight check, questions about eating/pooping/peeing, and physical exam first.  Which meant the questions.  There was discussion over the reflux and how that was going (was getting a little worse since we started working on the sleeping, and I think because she was eating six times a day instead of eight, so I was giving her thirty minutes total to eat, rather than the twenty I had been doing, and I planned to go back to twenty minutes total), my questions on the vaccines (I’ve reacted to the Pneumovax, so I wanted to make sure the pneumococcal vaccine she was getting wasn’t the same, or I’d want to wait two or three weeks on that one), and so forth.

Eventually, when the doctor was done, she sent the nurse to draw the vaccines.  Only the nurse was in with another patient, so I had set up and started breastfeeding on the other side way too early.  Daphne had finished eating by the time the nurse came in with the shots!  I left her at the breast for some comfort sucking, which she likes and does intermittently, while they gave the shots.  I couldn’t see the needle go in, but I could see her slowly open her eyes very wide, turn quite red in the face, open her mouth (with my boob still in it), and then scream.  My boob did nothing more than muffle her cry.  She calmed fairly easily, but she was certainly not soothed through it.

She slept on the way home, and then for three hours after getting home.  It was time for a nap, but we hadn’t expected such a long one.  When she woke up to eat, we found she had a reaction to the DTaP/IPV/Hib vaccine (all done in one shot) with a slightly raised, large, red area under the injection sight.  While that type of thing is fairly common as a reaction, it was a bit larger than I would expect to see, so we did call in to the doctor’s office.  Unfortunately, we missed their call back, so I have to get back in touch today.  It’s doing much better, but I’d like to have the reaction noted in her chart for reference.

Other than that, the appointment went well.  She’s looking alert and active, showing good head control (which we knew), is up to 11lb6oz (still growing at nearly half a pound a week), doesn’t have anything funky going on with her skin, and so on.  That growth rate means we’ve already moved on from just about all of the newborn clothes and will need to buy the next size up diapers (we’re using Gdiapers) soon!  (Interesting side note: she’s staying right around the 50th percentile mark at the moment for weight.  If she stays there, she’ll hit the 28lb mark (which is the max recommended size on the next size up Gdiapers) at 27mo (though it varies between 21mo and 34mo for the 75th and 25th percentiles, respectively).  If ECing works well, or she potty trains on the earlier side, there’s a good chance we won’t need the large Gdiapers.  It makes the purchasing decisions interesting.)

In other news, the sleeping has been going interesting.  She is doing better about napping semiregularly, but isn’t very consistent about how much sleep she’s getting in a day.  She had two days that were closer to 14 or 15 hours, and then two that were closer to 12 or 13, and then back to 14 or 15 last night.  That did, however, include a six hour long stretch of sleep, only moderately interrupted by intestinal fussiness.  (That made for eight hours between feeds at night – my boobs were confused.)  She isn’t going for very long awake during the day, but she seems generally happier, doesn’t take forever to get to sleep (we soothe her to the first stage of sleep – it’s taking between 10 and 45 minutes with the 10 occurring when we catch her sleep signs early enough).  We’re definitely getting a routine down – she gets sleepy and gets swaddled (it really helps, but Jason doesn’t do it as often because he’s not confident about swaddling her), and then bounced or jiggled in some fashion.  If it’s a fussier time, she may get a finger to suck on (pacifier if she’ll take one), and sung to or shhh’ed.  I’m hoping that setting up a routine that she comes to recognize as “this means sleep” will help in a few months when she’s even more inclined to fight sleep and explore the world.  In the meantime, she’s more rested, and seems to be feeding better.  I still need to investigate one other suggestion my midwife had – that I may have Raynaud’s in the nipple.  Basically, that’s vasoconstriction – the blood vessels all clamp down, and when they open back up, it hurts a lot.  (Think of sitting on your foot or hand until it falls asleep (REALLY asleep) and what it feels like when it “wakes up”.)

Saw the OT today. She definitely saw improvement in her lips, and some in her tongue, but she was still using her tongue inconsistently. Between the humped tongue in the middle and cupping at the tip, she suspects she likely has a very slight posterior tongue tie. It might not even be worth treating surgically, but may be one little piece of the puzzle. She also confirmed my suspicions that the shoulder tension I see in Daphne when she’s eating (shoulders sometimes scrunched up around her neck) may be contributing to the poor tongue use since that posture pulls on the hyoid bone, which needs to move freely to operate the tongue.

She gave us one other exercise to do, helping to stretch out and release the muscles and tendons on either side of the base of the tongue. We are also going to have Jason do the exercises, since I have been unable to successfully do anything but the lip stretches. Turns out that baby girl is smart, and picky. Mom doesn’t get to put things in her mouth that aren’t a human nipple.

She was certainly pleased that Daphne showed some signs of improvement, but noted that we are getting close, developmentally, to the stage where her patterns are starting to set and getting improvement is going to be difficult. She suggested that we see a local physical therapist who also specializes in newborn feeding issues, and who may be able to help work on the head/neck/shoulder issue from another angle. She was also very supportive of my thought of seeing an osteopath who was recommended to me for cranial osteopathy work. (I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it could help with her reflux as well.)

I was even able to get ahold of the PT, who seemed to have an idea of where to go with this just based off of the description I gave her.  Unfortunately, she doesn’t have an appointment for another three weeks.  I’m feeling a bit time-pressured by the whole thing, but we scheduled an appointment for early July and are on her wait list.  It’s a good thing I’ve got pretty much all my days wide open!  Wednesday, when they’re open again, I’ll be calling the DO and seeing if they can get her in soon as well.