Another option, depending on how many spoons you have, is the raised paint? That comes out of a tube? And draw your own designs on the bottom of the moccasins.
(works for socks too. Also, for labelling the socks. At one point the J’s had matching socks in different sizes, and the bottom of each had either a 1 or a 2 on it to designate which child that pair belonged to)
I did this for footie PJs.
Ok I need a pep/rationality talk.
I would love for baby to take a nap or two in her crib every day. I would love for her to not nurse to sleep. I would love to be able to even detect drowsy but awake and be able to put her to bed at that point and have it work.
If I nurse her to at least almost asleep and then rock her to sleep and wait like, 15-30 minutes, I can sometimes get her to sleep in her crib during the day.
Things I’m reading (The No Cry Sleep Solution & Taking Cara Babies) make it seem like these are totally reasonable to have in a newborn, and indeed the foundation for an older baby that will fall asleep and nap independently.
I can’t figure them out. Like, if I try to make a crib nap happen without a solid period of nursing AND getting into deeper sleep in my arms, crying happens. And then she gets into overtired during the short window between reasonable to start getting tired and you overshot and then it’s an ordeal to get her to sleep at all.
I’ve been trying to get crib naps to happen from sleepy but awake and I just can’t figure it out. Maybe I haven’t been trying long enough. Maybe I don’t have the patience to sit there and do soothing for even a couple minutes while she’s crying. Maybe my hesitation to give a pacifier I don’t even know if she would take is screwing me over. I don’t know.
I’m torn between just do what is working for her sleep and suck it up on the not getting my body to myself front, but then feel like I’m screwing up her future sleep and feel guilty. Or I could keep on trying to get her to go to sleep by herself and suffer the crying and feel guilty.
AHHHHH
Also trying to get GM to try getting her to sleep as well, but he’s always like she’s hungry. But she just freaking ate. But I would also think she’s hungry so I can’t blame him. But Ahhh, I don’t care just take the baby for two hours and don’t talk to me. But also don’t… when I leave her with him for an hour for an appointment I feel terrible not knowing how she is.
Halp.
Hmmm I think you may be a little too soon for “sleepy but awake” or toy may not be getting quite “sleepy” enough.
We would rock to almost asleep by walking her around the (dark) room in our arms. (TBH she would cry during much of that). Then, when she got super calm and was right on the edge of almost asleep/just maybe barely asleep, we would rocker her down into the crib. 50% of the time she would start to cry immediately so we would pick her up right away and start the process again. The first a d usually second nap of the day would end up being a successful crib nap, anything after that usually ended up as a contact nap regardless.
Prioritizing crib naps was a priority for me to have a break from the baby being on me, but it was a LOT of work for each nap and maybe not actually worth it? YMMV.
I am bad at predicting sleep cues so we used the Huckleberry app and I just plugged in her age and it would tell me when the next nap should be based on the time she woke up from the last one. At some point it can “predict” naps based on that specific baby’s schedule but not until after 8 weeks.
We would always feed right after waking and never feed to sleep. Again, looking back maybe I should have just rolled with it? But it was the middle of a pandemic with huge surge in my city pre-vaccine so we literally didn’t leave the house except for an afternoon or morning walk around the block and my husband was working overnight shifts in the lab to avoid exposure so he would sleep during the day and I just really really needed a few minutes without the baby on me so I made it happen despite the extra effort involved.
FWIW, I would completely remove the 'screwing up her future sleep ’ from your list of reasons. My kid put herself to sleep drowsy but awake for several months of bliss but she’s been a horrible sleeper for a couple years now and we did/do everything “right” in the very early days.
You will have lots of time to try new things or put new systems in place in the future. So what works for you now and take the future as it comes!
Sorry, lots of thoughts!
I would highly recommend “Precious Little Sleep” (book or there are blog articles). I’m pretty sure she describes sleep before 6 weeks as being ruled by mischievous fairies and nothing rational. It’s the most science -based sleep resource I found.
Sooo wait a week?
Do you know if there’s any adjustment for gestational age vs since birth age? Like does it matter that she was four days “early”?
I’m not sure! Pipsqueak was born at 39 weeks and I generally went with a non-adjusted age.
I just went to the blog and it got a complete overhaul a s I can’t find my go-to articles! But I highly recommend the book over taking cara babies. I’d send you my copy but I’ve already passed it on.
ETA are you swaddling for naps? We did and it definitely helped with crib naps
Yep, swaddling for naps and night sleeps!
It was $10 on Amazon Kindle so I just bought it.
From my experience (and my friends who had babies after me) starting to panic about sleep happens around 4-5 weeks old so you’re right on schedule! Combined experience also suggests that it’s a couple weeks too early to do much about it, but having a plan in pace helped make it sustainable for a little longer.
You’ve got this! You deserve some crib/greyman naps
“So I kept reading, tying myself in knots trying to reconcile the contradictory advice: nurse more, space out nursing, stick to a fixed schedule, don’t let him get overtired, hold him constantly, help him learn to sleep without you, pacifiers are helpful, pacifiers are the devil. Nothing was working, and my sleep strategy amounted to “keep slogging through.””
It me
IMO, any advice about baby sleep beyond survive, who TF knows, babies are trolls, before about 8-12 weeks, is bullshit 
other than like, letting them get overtired or overstimulated will make it harder to get them to sleep, try to learn the early sleepy signs versus the later ones, and “here’s some tools that might help, somewhere between 25-33% will work for any given baby and the rest won’t, no you don’t get to know ahead of time, they may switch preferences at will”.
Another vote for “you definitely arent screwing her up long term” and “4 weeks is exactly when we went out and bought a $400 co-sleeping crib for Duckling because Sleep Panic”. I fed my kids to sleep and they both had naps in their own beds and are decent (duckling) and getting there (pumpkin). They were dependent on me for falling asleep a lot, but that was something i was willing to swap for them falling the heck to sleep in their cases. There are lots of ways to do this, just gotta get through it while you learn what sort of sleeper Mo is and wait for her to mature a bit more. Pumpkin is a light sleeper and needs white noise and midnight snacks (like, jam sandwiches and bananas at the moment), she gets wired when overtired. Duckling is heavy once he gets down and gets shitty when overtired.
I personally think “drowsy but awake” is a joke played on poor sleep-deprived parents.
A few things that helped us:
I did Alexis Dubief’s sleep club this summer, which is a group-based sleep consultation service (cost a few hundred dollars), and she supported us in working towards independent sleep. What that looked like for us at a few months was putting her down in the snoo awake, swaddled, and holding the pacifier in her mouth while she fell asleep. Yes there was a little crying but not a lot because we were still assisting with rocking and pacifier holding, and I wasn’t ready for full “Cry it out”, but it did get her to sleep in the snoo a little longer.
Right now we are feeding many snacks in the 2h between dinner and bed, and I think we need to add an in room banana
It’s worth bearing in mind that there is a MASSIVE shift in brain function, hormone production, wake windows, etc that happens between 3-4 months. Before that, they’re like… still forming their nervous system. As far as the animal kingdom is concerned, they’re preemies. Some kids you can even SEE IT in the way their eye contact and engagement changes. Tonnnns of sleep stuff changes along with this transition, when they go from disorganized womb potato to like… round human baby.
Oh man this was absolutely Duckling. a womb prune until a few months old.
I’ll add to the you are absolutely not ruining your babies long term sleep at this age! My kids are just finally freaking figuring out sleep at 5 and 2 years old. My 5 year old literally woke up every night until a couple months ago. When people asked if she slept through the night I laughed and laughed then cried a bit.
At 5 weeks both my kids mostly took naps on me but eventually we moved to crib naps slowly and they figured it out with some protesting(much less with the younger one). Babies and kids all eventually figure out sleep! Some take longer than others.
Lol this is me
My grandma did make me feel better when she told me that my uncle literally never slept through the night. He’s in his 50s still gets up. He was also her 4th kid so when he was like 3 she taught him how to get his own snack and go back to bed.