What’s Amara Doing?

As many parents can attest putting children to sleep can be a challenge. We certainly have had our share of sleep problems with Amara. I have a routine worked out to get Amara to sleep that goes something like this:

• Lay out the swaddling blanket under her mobile.
• Turn on mobile rotation and music. The music is important. It is apparently just not as interesting without it.
• Place Amara on blanket, ready to be swaddled.
• Stick a soother in her mouth to stop her from crying long enough to notice that the mobile is there.
• Let her enjoy the fascinating wonders of the mobile for a minute.
• While she is thoroughly entranced by the mobile, swaddle her, hoping that she doesn’t notice, and if she does, that she does not protest too much.
• Let her calm down a minute. She almost always notices that she got swaddled, though she never takes her eyes off the mobile. Take this opportunity to close the bedroom door, turn the mobile’s lights on, turn the room lights off and turn the Sleep Sheep on.
• Pick her up to console her, as turning off the light has surely made her upset again.
• Proceed to rocking chair and sit down.
• Lying her sideways in a cradle hold, rock the chair and give a gentle jiggle with arms.
• Sing: Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town followed by Brian Wilson followed by Stand By Me. Repeat if necessary; usually a repeat of Elderly Woman is.
• Repeatedly put the soother back in her mouth when it comes out during crying and squirming.
• When eyes are closed proceed to shushing.
• When eyes have been closed for a minute cease rocking and jiggling.
• If eyes open resume jiggling and rocking, maybe resume singing/shushing.
• When eyes have stayed closed for a minute while not rocking or jiggling, get up from chair.
• Curse at the chair for creaking when getting up.
• Shush and jiggle if eyes open to calm her back to sleep.
• Place her in crib.
• Reset Sleep Sheep timer.
• see that she settles.
• If she does not settle, rub belly and shush. Pray that she doesn’t get agitated enough that you have to go back to the chair and start all over again.
• If she settles reset Sleep Sheep timer and quietly exit room.
• Check video monitor to see that she is still asleep.
• Hope that when she spits out her soother, and she will spit out her soother, that she goes back to sleep.

As you can see this is an intricate and physically exhausting operation.

This week we have had three impediments to this method.

1. The batteries gave out on the Sleep Sheep mid way through settling her. Luckily, we had replacements on hand.
2. The batteries on the mobile gave out and we did not have replacements on hand because it takes Cs. It took us a couple of days to get ourselves organized enough to get them. I bought a big supply
3. It suddenly got hot. So hot that Amara would not settle in her swaddle. The problem with her being unswaddled is that Amara punches herself in the face (accidentally), and wakes herself up. She would only sleep if Kate was next to her. Then it was my turn to get her settled. I generate a lot of body heat normally. Add to that the heat generated by jiggling her and the fact that Amara gets her body heat generation genes from me and it gets uncomfortably hot quickly. Last night we broke down and bought a portable air conditioner.

Wow, time for bed. Just thinking about all that work is exhausting me. I’ll try and get some video of her ridiculous enjoyment of the mobile.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 10:00 pm and is filed under Dad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.