Sleep Secrets Shared By Mommies

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one,” author Leo J Burke so cleverly interpreted it. We understand how exhausting it can be when your newborn doesn’t sleep and keep crying at night. We will share with you some sleep secrets as below, as shared by other mommies. 🙂

Some babies sleep in the day but becomes a party animal when the moon rises.  According to PD, this is normal. It is because the babies are not aware of the difference of day and night. Your baby need to sleep and be fed throughout so as to grow and develop normally. She needs to eat around the clock at first but will gradually sleep more at night and less during the day. You can begin to teach your baby the difference between night and day by behaving differently at different times. During the day, talk to your baby more while you feed her. Keep it light and bright. At night, be more subdued and quiet. Keep the lighting down. Eventually, she’ll catch on and begin to sleep more at night. If your baby tends to sleep all day, dozing through her feedings, try waking her up to eat. She needs to learn that the longest sleeping period is during the night. Help her to be a bit more organised at this point by taking her into the center of family activity at around late afternoon. Even if she dozes, keep her upright in an infant seat, carrier, or bouncy chair. Then give her a bath around early evening. This will keep her awake and relax her for her long sleep (four to five hours, hopefully) ahead.  No child “sleeps through the night”, but babies do reach the point where they can get themselves back to sleep when they wake up periodically. Your baby may cry due to hungry, wet diaper  or may also be due to being gassy (wind in tummy),  feeling too warm or cold, needs a cuddle or simply looking for comfort latch. If it is too often, speak to your PD. Your PD may recommend a professional sleep consultant on how to train your baby to sleep better.

But what happens when a baby cries all night even after giving her milk, rubbing on the tummies, cuddling, carrying, swaddling but it all don’t work? We understand how frustrating as one can be, here we are going to talk about some of the interesting methods shared by some of the mommies whom our confinement nannies had encountered. Have you experienced or remember the sleep methods of what our mama or grandma used to do (to make us sleep well) when we were young? Talking about old Chinese beliefs, we spoke to a few of our nannies and the interesting things that they have encountered in the course of their work.

Here are some of the interesting customs n beliefs practiced by Chinese families on old Chinese beliefs that were being passed down by generations. Based on zero scientific explanation, It may work or it may not work, well just for the fun of it!

a. The duration should be short. Place the offerings (full month celebration type of food/confinement food) on the bed, light the joss sticks and then you can prepare to burn the offerings “四方金” and “床母衣”. If you spent too long in praying, hearsay the child will have a tendency to laze in bed next time because 床母 will pamper the child too much.

Sometimes it may be due to the baby gotten a fright, maybe the dog’s bark startle the baby or the airplane flew past etc.

Interestingly, one of the grandma shared “Call the baby’s name 7 times (in one breath) by his ear during at night, in the wee quiet hours. Boys left ear and girl right ear. She said it worked for all her grandchildren, they slept well after that. Worth a try perhaps?

We have many interesting stories to share but it is all based on superstitious beliefs which we will not touch on. The above were merely experiences shared by other mommies to our confinement nannies, interestingly some worked.