How to Sleep Like a French Baby

These days, I mostly hear how lucky I am that Patapon is such a great sleeper. And yes, he does sleep between 11 and 12 hours every night, and slept at least 8 hour stretches from the age of about 2 months. So, basically, we struck parenting gold, right?

Well, I am not so sure. He is not that great a sleeper by French standards.

And I also remember the first two weeks of his life very vividly. Clutching the screaming infant who would. not. sleep. Ever. Calling in despair various people, who would all offer commiserations but little hope for the next few months.

Yes, I will have a think about that "sleeping" idea of yours, Mother, but I don't like the sound of it.

I was following all the advice I had been given by the midwife and health visitor: 

• Patapon's Moses basket was next to my side of the bed (although it was mostly for tripping over, as he refused to stay in it). 
• As soon as he made feeding noises or gestures ("clues") I would feed him, and not wait for him to get all worked up.
• "You can't spoil a two-week old."

Patapon would only agree to sleep in someone's arms, so Simon and I took turn having cat-naps, but then, after about 5 minutes, Patapon would express a "clue" and Simon would have to wake me up. Jude would fall asleep almost as soon as I started feeding him, yet would wake up the second I gestured towards putting him down, even next to me on the bed. But DON'T FALL ASLEEP WITH THE BABY IN YOUR ARMS! was the advice.

All the fun, all the time.

Then my Mum came over, and took matters into her own hands. And it worked. 

So, I give you:

The French Method

Tested and approved by most of the the French babies I know, and most certainly by the 11 babies my grand-mother, mother and I have had between us so far.

(Catchy, hey!)

This is my baby Mum, approving.

Basically, there are two ideas:

1. Don't pick up the baby straight away.

2. Feed at regular intervals, not on demand.

There is also a general spirit of not over-thinking the decisions, not imagining dreadful implications or believing the scare-mongering. It is more: 

Right now, your child needs food and sleep: here is what I know works so you can actually provide these things, rather than a general "philosophy" you like and to which you cling with whitening knuckles as your sanity slowly oozes out of your sleep-deprived brain.
You love him, you feed him, he sleeps? He's fine. 

But here is the nitty-gritty of the method (please imagine that this is my Mum and my Grandmother talking to you, not me, they have a lot more credibility):

Don't pick up the baby straight away

The idea is to wait a few minutes when you hear your baby cry. But that means ACTUAL minutes, not I-swear-it's-been-ages hormonal minutes. (Not that I have been there or anything...)
This is to help your baby connect sleep-cycles without fully waking up, and therefore gradually sleep longer. If you check on him straight away, you will wake him up fully (or so I hear... erm... moving on...), whereas if you wait a bit he may just fall back to sleep, into the next cycle. If he is fully awake, you go pick him up after those five minutes and check what is wrong. 

Such sleeping.

Problems: 

- You need to start this straight away if possible, and before the baby is 3-4 months old anyway. After that, it's not going to work.

- I am not sure how well that works with co-sleeping as this practice is extremely uncommon in France and I personally didn't particularly want to try it. 

Patapon only slept in our bedroom for a couple of weeks, because we would wake each other up constantly. When my Mum arrived she declared the NHS advice officially failing and we started putting him down in his own room. (Worry not, our house is tiny, we could hear him very well still.) 

- In Bringing Up Bébé, Pamela Druckerman gives this as the one and only thing you need to do for your baby to sleep through the night. It wasn't enough for me, I had to also follow Piece of Advice number 2. But this may be because of the whole sleeping-in-arms thing Patapon had going.

- For us, we first had to make him accept to actually fall asleep in the Moses basket, so for the first two weeks, the Pause wasn't really an option for us. 

With this problem, my Mum was all for letting him cry until he accepted the fact that this was his bed, not our arms. I don't have a problem with that, and we would have done it if all else had failed. Instead, I ended up spending a lot of time trying to soothe him to sleep in his basket, which did eventually work (nursing him to sleep didn't). It took a couple of days, but once he'd done it a few times, he was fine sleeping there without needing cajoling most of the time.

Bonus: to this day, the songs I used to sing him then make him all drowsy!

Feed at regular intervals, not on demand

The other thing my mum insisted I do is stop looking for clues and start simply spacing out feeds by three hours. We would try and distract Patapon if he woke up or started fussing in-between (that meant a LOT of walking him around in the baby-carrier), but mostly held out. I did occasionally feed him earlier if I knew he had not fed very well the last time (falling asleep in the middle for example).

Before that J. was asking to be fed constantly, but only nursed for a couple of minutes at a time. With the interval method, he was hungrier when I did feed him, therefore he nursed much better and then could hold out much longer. 

It made a huge difference almost overnight. Simon and I had a three nights when we took turns to go and comfort Patapon when he woke up crying before the "interval" was over, and that was it. After that, he slept at least the required interval, and gradually more. At one month we moved him to four-hour intervals during the day, but he was already sleeping at least 4-hour stretches at night. 

According to my Mum, that's pretty standard (apparently, I started doing 6-hour stretches at three weeks when my Mum begged me to - my big brother and I are nearly Irish twins, she was exhausted) . 

This is my clever face

The only case of regression she had was my little brother, he was about 8-weeks old, and sleeping 8-hour stretches, when we all went on holidays to the south of France, and the heat made him thirsty. But he got used to it after a few days and stopped needing middle-of-the-night nursing again.

Much snooze

Problems:

- My grand-mother says not to start doing this straight away, unlike the Pause, but to wait until the milk has come in.

- For those using NFP, the long stretches at night may cause early return of fertility, despite exclusive breastfeeding. It didn't for me, but I can't guarantee it!

- Some have suggested that spacing out like this will affect milk supply if you do it before the 12 week "established breastfeeding" mark. Breastfeeding is not as prevalent in France so I am not sure about that one in general terms, all I can say is that  it didn't at all prevent my grand-mother, my mother and I to exclusively breastfeed our babies for as long as we wanted.

- I have also heard people say that babies need to be fed more often than that because they only have tiny stomachs, to which I can say many things, including:

• a tiny stomach, yes, but in proportion to a tiny body 
• they also have a gut
• it's actually good for the stomach to be empty every now and again
• my grandmother and mother still managed to have absolutely enormous babies, so I don't think we were under-fed

Me, looking under-fed

Here you go. I hope this may be helpful for some people. Obviously, I don't claim expert scientific knowledge, nor do I think everybody MUST do the same thing as us. 

You do you, Internet. 

This is just what we did, following my mother's advice who had followed her mother's advice before, and it helped Jude sleep through the night pretty quickly, despite the fact that he traveled to Liverpool, London, Paris, Lyon, Paris again, the Atlantic coast of France, Paris once more, London again and then finally home, in the first month of his life.