Those signs you receive at baby showers that are supposed to go on your front door asking people to knock softly and avoid ringing the doorbell so your baby will stay asleep are really interesting to me. Not that I don’t understand how badly it sucks when you finally get a baby to sleep to have them wake up sooner than you’d like. No, I get that. But those signs worry me that new parents might think the only way to keep their baby asleep is to tiptoe around the house in their socks and speak in a nearly inaudible whisper. That really limits what you can do as a new parent. It’s super impractical, in my opinion.
I remember images of our baby asleep in her bouncy seat. One particular time comes to mind: our friends came over with their toddler, and we ate brunch and talked in normal voices, and then the toddler had a tantrum about having a poop diaper, and then our dog went crazy and started barking – and our baby slept right through all of it. She didn’t even stir. But later, after everyone had gone home, and our dog was taking a nap, and my husband and I were reading quietly, a pen dropped off of the edge of the countertop – and our baby startled awake and began crying!
What? That doesn’t make any sense. Unless you take into account that newborns sleep patterns are different than ours and won’t look familiar until they’ve made it through that 4th trimester, about 12 weeks. For myself and my baby, I found that wearing her during the daytime hours for the first three months (and yes, it was almost constant!) allowed me to maintain normal activity during the day – with normal volume.
I listened to talk radio the whole day through. It was my constant companion aside from my first-born. I never thought to lower the volume of the radio just because she was sleeping, I wouldn’t be able to hear it! So our days were spent listening to the soundtrack of a rowdy dog plus NPR personalities keeping us up-to-date on the greater world around us. And she would wake and sleep at intervals that were pretty normal for a newborn – every couple of hours, as she needed to eat. Once we’d finished a breastfeeding session, we’d have a little face-to-face time, do a diaper-change, and she’d get another little snooze in before the whole cycle began again.
Babies can be very different one, from the next, and if you find that you have a baby that really requires a quiet house in order to sleep at all, then maybe these signs are for you. And I sincerely hope that they work and that you get some sleep while you’re baby is sleeping too.
But if you’re finding yourself feeling locked in your house because it’s nap-time, and you can’t have anyone over or listen to music or a podcast while you’re baby’s sleeping for fear of waking them up, then maybe see what happens if you strap them on and go about your day with normal volume.
You need to find the right balance for both of you. It’s important to take your baby’s needs into account, but I’d argue it’s just as important to take your own needs into account. You’ll be a much happier parent if you feel like you can maintain some form of normalcy in that newborn period.
For me, walking on tiptoe and speaking in whispers wasn’t going to cut it. Thankfully, my baby seemed just fine with daytime noises – she’d just tune them out when she really wanted to sleep hard, but if she was in a lighter state of sleep she’d more or less doze until she was ready for her next meal.
She always woke up to eat – no matter the volume of what was going on around her.
Did you have a sign that you put on your front door asking people not to knock or ring the doorbell? Did it make a difference in terms of how long you baby would sleep at a stretch?
