General Things I've Learned and Tried - Baby #3

• I am not sure that I have any control over how a baby sleeps. You would think that I'd be having some effect, but I'm not sure it's up to me. I think it's all up to the baby. How do we "do sleep" in our house?
• Feed on demand all day and all night. When the baby will take the boob, give the boob. 
• Sleeping babies or sleepy babies are put to bed in their crib, swaddled from the start to keep their flailing arms under control. It's magical when you can take a sleepy baby, lay them in their crib, and watch them fall asleep. 
• Not all babies do this often, though. Some babies, especially the more spirited ones, need to be wrestled to sleep. They need shushing and nursing and rocking and bouncing and gentle jostling (like jello, not a bounce house) before they can find a comfortable and slip into sleep. And sometimes your calm, slow-to-scream babies need lots of help, too. And then your spirited baby will end up being able to fall asleep anytime, anywhere when she needs to. Go figure! Babyhood and childhood seem a bit difficult for everyone involved, and as parents, it's a part of our job to walk our children through the difficulties of life.
• Nursing to sleep sometimes will not doom you to be a "human pacifier." The Boob is magical, and pacifiers are just "plastic boobs," and it's not the other way around. Pacifiers are best used when baby wants to nurse 24-7 and mom needs a bit of a break. I recommend other options before using a pacifier, because:
• Pacifiers can cause nipple confusion, or nursing strikes. I would much rather deal with sore nipples and fatigue than looking for signs of dehydration and wondering how I could force my baby to drink, please, it's been almost 12 hours without a good nursing session.
• Pacifiers are addicting, both for parents and baby. It's easy to miss other needs (poopy diaper, cold/hot discomfort, lonely, etc) when you can just pop a paci in and move on. Also, my constant nurser and screamer, Baby #2, is almost 2 and still addicted, mostly because I haven't wanted to give it up yet. 
• Breastmilk digests very quickly (faster than formula or solid foods), and babies can regulate not only how much they want to drink, but how long and aggressively they drink can determine the content of what they get. 
• Learn your baby. Although there are many people and resources to help you troubleshoot, you are the expert of your baby, and the resources can help elicit solutions that you think could work with your child. 
• White noise, oh how I love thee. Having white noise in our kids' rooms is most likely why we already have three of them. White noise not only replicates the noise of the womb and is therefore soothing, it can drown out the noises of the house (or neighbors, or traffic, etc) after bedtime. Not all of my kids are deep sleepers, even though I tried to acclimate them to noises at an early age, so it's great to be able to walk down a creaky hall or watch a movie without worrying about waking them up. And it's important for tired babies to get the sleep they need. When a baby wakes up earlier than he should have, he can be too crabby to eat well, and then spends his entire awake time even more crabby because he's both tired and hungry. One crabby rotation can throw off the entire day, because over-tired babies just can't deal.
• I could write pages and pages about nursing. For right now, I'll note one peculiar nursing habit of Baby #3 that was puzzling at first: Upon wakening, not being interested in drinking more than a minute. "Why aren't you hungry?!" I worried. "I was just a bit thirsty right now. You'll be here later, so I'm in no rush to eat!" When he nurses for just a moment after waking up, I try to offer him another drink when he starts to get tired. He usually drinks deeply and calmly then, and I put him down for a nap when he stops swallowing.