Part Three of Our Arsenal

Before I do prescription medications, there is other randomness that I wanted to touch on.

One of Harvey Karp's 5 S's is swaddling, which I talked about already. Another is sucking, the breast, a pacifier, a finger, whatever. Babies like to suck, it soothes them, calms them, hence the name..pacifier. The book/video teaches you how to train baby to keep the pacifier in better. This only works if baby will even take the pacifier in the first place. Princess Katie refuses. We have tried 5 different kinds with no avail. I'm going to keep trying though.

Another of the S's is swinging. We have the Fisher Price Rainforest Swing. I liked the feature that baby could swing either direction. All babies love to swing, right? Wrong. Katie hated the damn thing. The most we could get her to sit in it was about 5 minutes at a time until she started on Zantac. Now she loves her swing. I often use it to get her to sleep and then move her to her crib. We even purchased the Rainforest Take Along Swing to keep in her bedroom.

Around the time we started the Zantac, we propped the head of whatever she was sleeping in. Books under the feet of the pack n play, the wheels up on one end of the bassinet and down on the other, and folded blankets under one end of the crib mattress. Besides swaddling, this is one of the few things that has been a consistant success.

We also purchased a sleep positioner. We swaddle Katie up and wedge her down into it. It helps her feel more secure and sleep longer. I got the exact one that is linked because it's the least bulky and easy to take with us when we go somewhere. If you think about how baby is kind of scrunched when you're holding her, one arm under the head and one arm under the legs, it's natural that baby is going to wake up when layed flat. So in addition to propping the crib and using the positioner, we often place a rolled blanket under her knees.

White noise is something else we use every. single. day. Babies experience so much sound and sensation when in the womb and once they're born we put them in a dark quiet place to sleep and it's like sensory deprivation for them. You can buy white noise machines, CDs, etc. We use a hand held radio set to fuzz, it's small and travels with us easily. After one of Katie's roughest days ever, Eric came home, rocked her a bit and put her down for a nap with country music blaring nearly as loud as he could get it. She slept for 2hrs and was the first time she'd stayed sleeping that long in at least a week.