Friday, February 5, 2010

And the livin's E.A.S.Y.

In my previous post, I made Johnny's disgust for napping known. I talked about the entrance of the lovely vacuum into our lives and my ingenious idea of making vacuum songs for Johnny to fall asleep to, so his nap looked something like this:
 Observe the iPod speakers in the bottom left corner. And the swing needed to get him to sleep.

Well, I take it all back. After almost week of trying to get to him to nap during the day, we're not doing so hot. He has decided that napping is not his thing and he can resist the magic of the vacuum noise if he really wants to. This has lead to him being severely overtired and thus, totally fussy and inconsolable in the evening, as Grandma Durso can attest to. I have decided that it's not okay to have a child who is overtired! The poor thing is so worked up that he can't get himself to sleep; it's tragic, really. Who doesn't love sleep?

And so I turned to my dear friend, the Interwebz.

I discovered a method called E.A.S.Y. by Tracy Hogg that revolves around making a pattern for your infant so they learn what to expect after a certain amount of time and to make it easier for exhausted moms to tell apart their child's cries. Oh, and to get their child some rest so that their cries actually sound different.
E: Eat
A: Activity
S: Sleep
Y: Your time (during the sleep)
The best part is, it's not a "cry it out" method, which I don't think I could handle, but was willing to try to get my poor son to sleep. All I have to do is follow the above chain of events and work on getting him into a rhythm. Ideally, he'd be on a 3-hour cycle, so he eats for 30 minutes, plays for 30 - 60 minutes and naps for 90 - 120 minutes. However, since the author stresses that every child is different  you need to refer to your child's cues, not a clock. Granted, it's not an easy thing to achieve, so it'll take some time. Hopefully, after a week (that's the average time it takes to take effect), I'll have a more rested, happier infant. So we can deviate from this:

To this:
 
It's a work in progress. 

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