I fanatically followed the age-appropriate waking windows prescribed by child sleep specialists, scrupulously recorded the times of waking up and going to sleep, monitored the duration of falling asleep, as well as the sleep itself. … I was growing more and more restless, and the baby still wasn’t sleeping.
Summer 2025. July. Cherries go for 15 EUR per kilo, a cat is frying an egg on a hot tin roof, and I am in the ninth circle of hell with a second baby that won’t sleep.
After the inhuman torment I went through with my first, whose only life ambition seemed to be to NEVER sleep, I had a slight hope that the next one will be different and improve the bitter taste of the previous experience at least a little. And indeed, after the first few weeks of adaptation, the baby showed that he was not immune to falling quickly and sound asleep or doing good stretches of night sleep, which was something unknown in my previous experience as a mother of a newborn. What joy, what happiness! To go on a relaxing walk in the park with the stroller, drink a frappe, listen to inspiring podcasts and breathe in the fragrant forest aromas! And all while the baby is napping away peacefully.
This idyllic phase lasted about two months. By the middle of the third month – at the end of May, the baby began to protest when put to sleep, to fall into hysterics as soon as the room darkened, and to take twice, even three times longer to fall asleep, if at all. The horror of the experience with the first baby returned and in full force. I began to rely more and more on the baby carrier to put him to sleep, and after he started waking up every 30 minutes – for the entire duration of his naps. Nighttime sleep also became fragmented. Panicked, I concluded that he was overtired during the day because he was only sleeping for short stretches, and I became even more obsessed with forcing him to sleep during the day so that he could sleep better at night. I fanatically followed the age-appropriate waking windows prescribed by child sleep specialists, scrupulously recorded the times of waking up and going to sleep, monitored the duration of falling asleep, as well as the sleep itself. ChatGPT was telling me: “don’t panic, you’re not doing anything wrong, your baby is just EXTREMELY OVERTIRED and you need to go into emergency mode, shorten the intervals and basically never let him be awake”. Every day he spewed out schedules with increasingly shorter intervals and increasingly impossible to achieve long naps, I was growing more and more restless, and the baby still wasn’t sleeping. I developed leg pains and varicose veins. I once complained to ChatGPT that I felt like an animal in a cage all over again, and the recent idyll of walks in the park seemed irretrievably lost.
Looking back, the entire month of June is marked by a feeling that gives me chills – it’s this painful feeling of hopelessness and drudgery, pure survival, far removed from all the good things in life. This feeling is not new to me, as I have entered survival mode more than once due to a number of circumstances, and for this reason I had some tools to cope. One of them is my own and in-depth online research, and another – professional help. And I don’t mean a child sleep specialist.
One day, already in July, when the baby had just turned 5 months old, I made a decision. My older child was suffering, my husband was afraid that we would all end up sick, my mother was worrying about how we’d cope all summer in the countryside with this regime and nerves, the baby was struggling, I was slowly losing my mind. So I called my therapist. We hadn’t spoken since I had given birth and she seemed to expect to hear something completely different from “we’re in trouble with sleep, I’m reliving the horror from last time and I need help.” Because she is a good specialist and knows me, she understood that I was stuck in tunnel thinking and that I urgently needed a change of perspective. She simply told me that babies can show us what they need and when, and all the schedules that we adults want to artificially impose on them will not work if they go against their needs. The conversation was short, a few lines and an appointment in a few days, but completely sufficient, because it gave me a kind of “permission” to break the strict rules that I had imposed on myself with the help of ChatGPT.
The very next day, while I was utilising all possible means to fit into the prescribed waking window of 2 and a half hours, which included, among others things, white noise, rocking the stroller, eye patch and shushing, something clicked. Gathering all the courage in the world, I let the baby fall asleep whenever. It’s true that when the interval passed the cherished 2 and a half hour point, I didn’t feel particularly happy. At 2:45 my stomach started to churn, at 3 it started to boil. I was nervously jumping from foot to foot, gritting my teeth, scratching my hands and using all sorts of self-soothing methods, just to hold back the urge to grab the baby and shove him into the backpack, where I could force him to sleep. And, oh my goodness, at about 3:05 the baby began to blink slower, and then at 3:07 he closed his eyes! He fell asleep! By himself, in the stroller, without all the endless fussing and painful choreography.
I fell into a stupor-like state. I didn’t dare to believe it, let alone celebrate, and I must have looked strange from the outside with my blank stare and expression-less face. After I came to my senses, however, a thought struck me and I quickly googled “why are such narrow wake windows recommended for babies”. I read about how wake windows, although useful as a rough guide, are far from the full picture when it comes to baby sleep. The article I found explains the accumulation of chronic sleep pressure, in addition to acute sleep pressure, as well as other interesting things that I won’t list, but you can read for yourself – I’ll leave a link at the end of the text. As I read, I felt the burden on my shoulders getting lighter and lighter. Things that I had read before now made real sense. My baby, perhaps, needed to stay awake for longer, not shorter stretches! I remembered that he always woke up smiling and was a cheerful and calm baby who did not fit into the idea of an overtired and nervous child. Compared to his brother, he was a real unicorn, happy to be left in his baby gym on his own, enjoying life and giving out smiles left and right. And for two months, I watched him and couldn’t wrap my head around how to help this overtired child.
That very evening, at bedtime, I put the baby on the bed, gave him the breast, and he fell asleep. Since then, the wake windows have been this abstraction, this high-level frame in the back of my mind that serve only as a reminder if the baby becomes nervous and it’s ”about that time”.
Soon after, I resumed those cherished walks in the park with a frappe and headphones, and my family breathed a sigh of relief.
Link to the article that turned out to be my “right place at the right time”: https://www.babysleepscience.com/single-post/the-science-behind-wake-windows-and-why-they-don-t-matter-as-much-as-you-think. Did you know there was such a thing as “orthosomnia”? Neither did I, and it turned out I had it! Fascinating.