Sleeping with Ayra

As of late, we started realizing that Ayra gets more and more cranky if she is sleepy. And somehow, the lil lady loves to ‘lawan mata’, meaning she will try her level best to pry her heavy heavy eyelids open no matter how droopy and difficult it is. Why she does this is truly a mystery. She will cry and cry and cry with her eyes half closed when she’s sleepy. So far we have only found 2 ways of getting her quiet. The first is of course to stuff her mouth with the boobies, and less than 5 minutes into the sucking she will fall asleep but only to awaken the moment the nipples drop out of her mouth and start the screaming all over again. This is really tricky as I have to really strain my back and supporting arm to wait patiently for her to really really get into deep sleep before even attempting to change her/my position. This, usually takes no less than an HOUR, no joke. Sometimes I give up and just let her sleep in my arms till the next feed 3 hours later. And no, she does not want the pacifier. Believe me, we tried with 3 different ones and she’d just push them out her mouth.

The second way is, to literally dance with her in our arms. We have to keep changing her position till she looks somewhat contented with it and walk, rock, sway, bounce, vibrate, swirl her around non-stop till she falls asleep. Bear in mind that until she does, she will be crying so this requires some hard will on my part. Sometimes one movement is sufficient, sometimes we’d have to try them all. The trick is to not stop the motion for at least half hour or again, until she is in deep deep sleep. In the earlier weeks, Daddy found that bouncing softly on the trampoline while carrying her is sufficient, but alas that old trick no longer works. And it gets even harder as she now prefers to be carried upright on our shoulders as opposed to lying down flat. That is really hard as she can’t support her head yet and we’d have to with our shoulders. Even before she fell asleep we’d be sore hahahaha. Lots of times I couldn’t bear her crying and again, use the first method to get her to sleep. Me as a human pacifier.

She hates to be put into the cot, I have to make sure the cot is warm before putting her in it and doing it reaaallllyyyy softly and slowly. She prefers our bed of course, right under my armpits but then I won’t be able to sleep for fear of crushing her. A cranky Mommy is not a good milk-producer. Not helping is the fact that she takes after me in the sense that she is a really light sleeper! Any kind of sound or movement startles her and she will wake up again screaming and the whole process starts again…

Then we noticed that she loved the man-made waterfall in the garden. Whenever she is cranky (and it is not nighttime) we’d take her out to the garden and she will fall quiet and just gaze around, and even fall asleep! I guess the sound of water flowing calms her down.. and so what do we do?? Daddy downloaded some nature sounds from the net and burned them into a cd. Oceans, rivers, waterfalls, jungle, lullabies. Every day we choose a sound she seems contented with and put the track on repeat in the room. As long as the sound is playing, she startles a whole lot less and sleeps longer. Hallelujah! Babies really do love white noise, especially those that reminds them of the womb sounds…

Some problems though,

1. The cd can get her to sleep better but does not help her to fall asleep
2. The cd can get crazy at times, i.e. pausing a long time before repeating and she has woken up a few times during the pause. Oh, and tracks get worn out too fast. The river track got corrupted after 2 days continuous play. Damn.
3. Now WE can’t sleep hahaha. It’s too hard for us to fall asleep with all the cricket, owls, water, birds, wind in the trees and perhaps ants marching in the background. Hmmmm

We need to find some better solution or get used to the sounds….

Ayra, asleep on my lap. I need the lappy and some reader’s digest to accompany me while she sleeps