Mama’s Tired, But Baby Isn’t With Alissa Marsh
Our guest is Alissa Marsh, who also is our daughter. Alissa, welcome.
Thank you.
She’s a busy young mother who also works from home. I wanted her to talk to us about babies and sleeping. She’s done some homework and effort and has found success. Alissa, tell us how it went with your first child.
It’s funny that you say babies and sleeping because those two words don’t go together.
No, they don’t.
That’s what we found with our eldest. When my eldest was born, I was 22 years old. I had nieces and nephews. I thought I knew a lot about raising children and I found out quickly how much I didn’t know. We had our eldest sleep in our bedroom with us. When I could hear her start to fuss, I quickly pick her up and nurse her and she would go right back to sleep. This was the first big mistake that I made. Any time she would make the slightest noise or movement, I’d quickly pick her up, nurse her and try and catch her before she woke up too much. I turned her into the lightest sleeper. Everyone makes some movements and some noises while they’re sleeping. Many of the times I got her up, she probably would have moved around a little bit and then be fine. One of the mistakes that I made was having her too close, having her right next to me so I can hear every little grunt.
This is typical of young parents. They want so badly to do it right and be the perfect parent that they become overly vigilant.
That’s what I did with her. I taught her that she needed me to fall back to sleep.
Do you feel like you trained her to be a light sleeper?
I did.
Is she still a light sleeper?
She is. Several years later, I’ll barely poke my head in her bedroom to check on her and she’ll sit right up.
It’s interesting how early habits can stick with you for many years. If she wants to overcome that, she may have to take some positive steps to retrain her brain. What about your second child?
With our second child, I thought I’d learn from my mistakes. I read about The Ferber Method and other cry it out methods for teaching your child to self-soothe and be able to sleep at night. That was what we were going to do. We made the mistakes with the first one. We were going to correct it with the second one.
The next one is going to be perfect.
I know everything now. The plan was to get him to self-soothe. When he was about three months old, I implemented our self-soothe plan where now you’re going to cry it out. It created a few horrible nights. I wasn’t consistent with it. He would scream in agony and I would second guess myself, “Am I doing the right thing? Am I doing the wrong thing?” Sometimes, I would go pick him up and sometimes, I would try and let him cry. I wasn’t consistent with it at all.
A concerned mother does more research than the FBI. Click To TweetHearing that cry is agonizing for a parent. It goes right to your heart.
I failed miserably and it didn’t feel right. We backed off and tried it again a couple of months later and it still didn’t feel right. We so backed off and gave up on sleep. At the time, I joked with my husband that I thought my three-year-old and my infant would have secret meetings to talk about how to make sure I was busy around the clock. They would take shifts on whose job it was to make sure I was awake. I thought there was a conspiracy with my children.
You made an interesting comment I liked. You said it didn’t feel right. The key to parenting is following that intuition. It’s going with that feeling. You might hear an absolutely amazing new discipline technique that sounds great, but when you try it and it doesn’t feel right, it may not be right for your child. You moved on to the third child.
With our youngest, we tried to learn from both experiences. One thing that I read that I realized I had not done and had not tried yet was more of a routine, more of a schedule. I had never wanted to be stuck to a schedule. I needed flexibility during the day. I didn’t want to have such a rigid schedule. I found a little bit of freedom and trying to create more of a schedule.
You found that the schedule can be liberating.
Yes, it’s not strictly adhered to. We didn’t exactly put down for a nap at 2:00 on the dot. We tried to stick relatively close to the same time frames. It seemed to benefit all of us. All my children seem to benefit more from having more of a schedule
A flexible schedule, but nonetheless structured.
More structure.
I have found that to be true. When I worked at the residential facility for youth at risk, it came up that a lot of them had not had that structure when they were younger. Some of them never had it until they got there. Structure makes a difference. Outline that structure for us.
Shortly after we brought her home from the hospital, we started a nighttime routine. I believe it was maybe around 8:00 PM. We would give her a bath and it was kisses and snuggles times. She would get loved on by the whole family. She would get her good nights from everyone. Everyone would get their chances for kisses and cuddles. I would nurse her and rock her for about an hour and then put her down for the night. When she woke through the night, I would nurse her, rock her, change her diaper if it was needed and rock her back to sleep. We were consistent with this. We made sure every night it was the same routine.
Where was her crib?
Her crib was in another bedroom.
Not the same bedroom, but a bedroom nearby so you could hear her.
She was in the next room and we did have a baby monitor. We try to keep it low so what we would hear her if she was in trouble or distress, but I wouldn’t hear every little noise.
No more jumping up at the slightest squeak.
No, definitely not. I found I was sleeping better. She wasn’t needing to eat during the night. When she did wake during the night, it was more for comfort and to be helped to go back to sleep. It wasn’t necessarily that she needed nourishment. When we felt that she could go through the night without eating, that was when we decided to try and let her self-soothe. I picked a night to start and decided to be consistent with it. I asked my husband for support. The first night when she woke during the night, I checked on her and made sure her diaper wasn’t messy. I stroked her back, talk to her for a minute, left the room and let her cry. The first night was rough. It was hard to listen to her cry. She may have cried for twenty or 30 minutes before she fell back asleep. She woke maybe one more time that night. She didn’t cry as long and went back to sleep.
Have you set a time limit before you decided, “I’m going to let her cry for this long.” Were you monitoring the cry?
I don’t remember, but I had set a time limit. I don’t remember exactly what it was. Thirty minutes was probably close to my limit. I’m grateful when she stopped crying. It may have been 30 minutes because I believe she cried about as long as I was going to let her. The next night she woke once or twice. It seemed like on the third night she fussed and stirred a little bit, but it was a big difference by night three. Shortly after, she was sleeping through the night.
Every child is different. It may not have worked for your oldest child, but it definitely worked for your youngest. It was almost like someone up there knew you would need this.
The timing was definitely a blessing. About 2.5 weeks after my youngest started sleeping through the night, our middle child was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He was in great danger and we ended up a week in a children’s hospital trying to save his life. We learned how to manage his health and keep him alive moving forward. It was a hard week and he wouldn’t let me leave his side for a minute. I needed to be in the hospital with him around the clock. For my husband to be able to take care of our baby daughter home and the evenings and have her sleep through the night, I didn’t need to be there, which was a huge blessing. I had to focus 100% on the child who needed me. It was definitely a blessing a gift from God.
You and your husband would be at the hospital. You would feed your baby, nurse her one last time and your husband could take her home. They both slept.
It’s a blessing for both of them. He was stressed out and worried about our son. He needed a break from the hospital. He needed to go home and be able to take that break.
It sounds like some key elements here where you had a supportive spouse. Parents, if you have a supportive spouse, be grateful for that. That makes a difference. You had done some research and reading and you had your experience from your two older children. You and your husband agreed on this plan, implemented it and it worked. Is your youngest still a good sleeper?
She’s a very good sleeper. She can fall asleep quickly. She sleeps solidly through the night almost as hard to wake up in the morning she sleeps so well.
Some of it they did get from their mother. Our favorite story about Alissa when she was growing up was the time she was a toddler. She wandered into our bedroom. We had a waterbed that had a gap between the base and the wall underneath the headboard. We woke up one night to hear her crying and we couldn’t find her. She wasn’t in her crib. We couldn’t find her in her room. We couldn’t find her anywhere in the house. We could detect the sound was coming from our room and we spent some panic-terrified minutes trying to find our little girl.
I finally tuned up my radar and located that this was coming from under the head of our bed. I got a flashlight so I can see. Sure enough, there she was halfway through this queen-size bed. I could barely reach in and grab her feet and gently pull her out. I went to comfort her when we got her out. She had been terrified from that experience and wanted nothing more than to go back to her room where she thought was safe. She went back to sleep.
She took on her heel and ran out of that room in her bed. She went right back to sleep. Do you remember that?
No, but it explains the claustrophobia.
That would be how you came by it.
On the other hand, you did find some other rather unique places to go to sleep. We found you in toy boxes, on hampers of laundry and all kinds of places where you had been playing and decided to go to sleep.
You even fell asleep standing. You were looking out the window and you’re leaning against the windowsill. I thought, “She’s standing so quietly.” I looked and you had fallen asleep. There’s a saying that a concerned mother does more research than the FBI. I think that’s true of you. I have observed that of you. When you had a child diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, you did a lot of research. That will be a topic for another podcast. It would be worthwhile to learn more about raising a child who was diagnosed at a young age.
He was not quite four years old.
I greatly admire the way you handled it at the beginning and are handling it now. We’ll talk about that. Let’s wish everyone a great day.
Thank you.