It should be so easy to parent in the digital age since information about every known subject to man is at our beckon call. How much should my baby be eating? How many naps should my baby take during the day? How much should a 6 month old weigh? When do babies start to crawl? This doesn't even skim the surface of my google searches. It should be easy, right? Because if someone has gone through it, has an opinion about it or has done research on it, chances are it will be online. Though that information is readily available and not too hard to locate, parents then have the task of sifting through all of this information, processing it, then molding it to fit our child's situation or twisting it to ease our insecurities.
When my son was four months old, he stopped sleeping through the night, and at first, it was a nightmare. My sweet angel went from sleeping at least four hours as a newborn to sleeping nine hours until the week after he turned four months old, when he decided that sleeping anywhere from one to three hours was acceptable. I finally understood the pain and exhaustion parents always warned me about but that I shrugged off because MY baby was a good sleeper. People would tell me how lucky we were, and I can't tell you how much I sympathized with those people until we weren't lucky in the sleep department anymore. So we decided something had to be wrong with my son and I began scouring the internet with every free moment I had, and learned a lot along the way. I diagnosed our situation with everything from the four month sleep regression all the way to vaccine side effects. I looked up nap and sleep schedules in the hopes of regulating my son's awake and asleep time to maximize our nightly uninterrupted sleep. I tried tirelessly for a few days to put my son on a schedule that was tailored to the needs of five month olds, and soon realized that my son doesn't fit that mold. It's said that five to six month old babies only need three naps a day, that they should be staying awake for two to two and a half hours at a time, and they should go to bed between 6:00-6:30pm because they need 12 hours of sleep at night. This is not true for our son, and when I finally tried to stop fitting us into all of these molds of what families, mothers, and babies his age should look like, sound like, act like and be accomplishing, I really started to live and learn how to parent. I began listening to my inner mothering instincts and listening to what my son was telling us. He needs to nap more than three times and he can't stay awake for two hours at a time during the day, unless we're away from home and he is distracted from his exhaustion, he doesn't need 12 hours of sleep at night to be the sweetest and happiest baby the next day. And you know what? We survived, we're still here, and we're still doing great.
While I love to have a plan, sometimes, uncharted motherhood and parenthood is the best thing for you, because you learn from your own experiences instead of from someone else's.
We ended up learning that our son had silent reflux and we have since been giving him oatmeal cereal in his formula. He has yet to sleep nine hours again, but as long as he's healthy and feeling better, that's all that matters to us.
When my son was four months old, he stopped sleeping through the night, and at first, it was a nightmare. My sweet angel went from sleeping at least four hours as a newborn to sleeping nine hours until the week after he turned four months old, when he decided that sleeping anywhere from one to three hours was acceptable. I finally understood the pain and exhaustion parents always warned me about but that I shrugged off because MY baby was a good sleeper. People would tell me how lucky we were, and I can't tell you how much I sympathized with those people until we weren't lucky in the sleep department anymore. So we decided something had to be wrong with my son and I began scouring the internet with every free moment I had, and learned a lot along the way. I diagnosed our situation with everything from the four month sleep regression all the way to vaccine side effects. I looked up nap and sleep schedules in the hopes of regulating my son's awake and asleep time to maximize our nightly uninterrupted sleep. I tried tirelessly for a few days to put my son on a schedule that was tailored to the needs of five month olds, and soon realized that my son doesn't fit that mold. It's said that five to six month old babies only need three naps a day, that they should be staying awake for two to two and a half hours at a time, and they should go to bed between 6:00-6:30pm because they need 12 hours of sleep at night. This is not true for our son, and when I finally tried to stop fitting us into all of these molds of what families, mothers, and babies his age should look like, sound like, act like and be accomplishing, I really started to live and learn how to parent. I began listening to my inner mothering instincts and listening to what my son was telling us. He needs to nap more than three times and he can't stay awake for two hours at a time during the day, unless we're away from home and he is distracted from his exhaustion, he doesn't need 12 hours of sleep at night to be the sweetest and happiest baby the next day. And you know what? We survived, we're still here, and we're still doing great.
While I love to have a plan, sometimes, uncharted motherhood and parenthood is the best thing for you, because you learn from your own experiences instead of from someone else's.
We ended up learning that our son had silent reflux and we have since been giving him oatmeal cereal in his formula. He has yet to sleep nine hours again, but as long as he's healthy and feeling better, that's all that matters to us.
Happy Living & God's Blessings!
J.M.
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