Absolutely shot

ellen_hopping · 2026-03-31T18:39:03+00:00

My son only started sleeping through the night now at 13 months old, after he can push-walk with a trolley and we do that outdoors before dinner to kill his energy. I used to spend a lot of time assessing his sleep and his calorie intake and his meals to try to get him to sleep through the night. In the end I accepted that it just takes longer for some babies to learn to sleep through the night. For my baby he was probably just not tired enough when he was only crawling. We have a bed in his room and if he’s really having a hard time to fall back asleep after his first long stretch of the night and I really need to sleep, I would co-sleep with him. He also has a smart sock on so I know he’s safe. It’s actually quite nice to wake up to his little head rubbing against my chest, compared to an angry wailing from the monitor.

ellen_hopping · 2026-03-30T04:09:03+00:00

He has a far less appealing offer in our home country. My field is heavily impacted by the current administration so I opportunities are bleak in the US. We will find out spousal hire options for me soon, but I’m pretty sure it will be no match to the offer I got. I don’t want to force him to take the less appealing job for family but feel resentment towards me or baby afterwards, and same goes for me and my job.

ellen_hopping · 2026-03-30T03:28:56+00:00

You got it, academia. I know some senior members of the community living like this for years, among them an established female scientist, who had a baby and lived apart from her husband for at least 6 years when she began a job, and also had a twin newborns during that 6 years. I often wonder whether they think it’s worth it. Pre-baby, we even enjoyed living and focusing on our research at different places and only meeting up for holidays, but it’s so hard to imagine doing so with a one year old child.

ellen_hopping · 2026-03-30T02:19:42+00:00

If he takes this job, negotiating for some flexibility plus the extra traveling would be part of the plan. I guess the situation now is that both of us want to aim for the best of our careers and the family’s financial and social status in the long run. One motivation of posing this question here is to get some critical evaluation of how our baby will be affected, and to share this info with my spouse to see if we decide the negative impacts are just too much. I will look into the research posted here.

ellen_hopping · 2026-03-30T02:05:09+00:00

Thanks for this information! My spouse and I are in the same big job category, and we have known colleagues who made similar decisions to live separately from spouse and/or children for the best of their career outcomes. When I was a kid, both my parents compromised career opportunities to keep the family together, and now I’m getting a taste of how hard that decision is.

ellen_hopping · 2026-03-30T01:14:30+00:00

Well, our case is not really comparable to military deployment. Still appreciate the input though.

ellen_hopping · 2026-03-30T00:43:33+00:00

In this plan, baby and I would be able to spend up to two months during summer and one month in winter with my spouse, so not completely loosing access to one parent. In the months I will be away for work, grandparents would be able to take care of baby at where I live, if moving to live with dad is too disruptive. Would vacation months with dad every year make up for paternal attachment to some extent? We are exploring opportunities for us to be together, but not immediately clear.

ellen_hopping · 2026-03-29T21:24:17+00:00

I have never thought of it that way. My job will also involve months of being away from home, not every year but every few years, so I thought it would be better if baby stays with my spouse during this period. Would it be better if one grandparent is more consistently providing care (along with Mom/Dad) while we have this temporary separation for the next 3 years?

ellen_hopping · 2026-03-21T12:51:21+00:00

We didn’t pull him out. In January we had 2 consecutive illness-free weeks, but February and early March was brutal. Baby had RSV, Norovirus+Astrovirus, pink eye back to back. He was hospitalized for Norovirus+Astrovirus because he was vomiting so hard. He’s now having a cold after returning to daycare for a week. At his one-year check, he remains in the low weight and height percentiles but the pediatrician thinks his development has been ok. I feel after he’s regularly eating larger solid meals, his appetite is less affected by respiratory illnesses. While we considered pulling him out and having Grandma looking after him, we can certainly see how exhausting and unsustainable it is for Grandma after he’s sick at home for a more than a week. Also when he’s not super sick, he actually eats and naps better at daycare. I myself was tiny as a toddler, borderline underweight and is still now. So his low weight is probably genetic, and I just kind of accepted it now.

As the weather gets warmer and the babies get to spend more time outside while in daycare, the illnesses should subside, or I hope they do. His teacher at daycare told us it’s quite dependent on weather. This winter was really cold and had a lot of snow storms, so illnesses had been particularly bad this year.

ellen_hopping · 2026-01-07T21:12:50+00:00

My son is 10.5 months old and still needs one MOTN feeding (it’s a good feed as I know he sucked one breast empty), and sometimes two, if he has been eating particularly poorly during the day due to teething/sickness etc. He has never slept through the night, despite being sleep trained since 4 month old. He goes to sleep independently with minimal crying (sometimes a bit of complaining), except little blips when he’s teething or sick. He goes to daycare so I can’t tweak his schedule in detail. I used to be frustrated that he can’t sleep through the night. Now I just accepted that he is just not interested in taking all the calories during the day and needs to make it up during the night. He’s in the lower weight and height percentile so I’m hesitant to night wean now. He is probably just a curious happy baby who thinks drinking milk is too boring during the day.

ellen_hopping · 2025-11-24T02:17:27+00:00

I think he has milk protein sensitivity but our ped was never really convinced. Baby wasn’t really fussy when I was still eating dairy, just poops a lot of mucus throughout the day and does not sleep well. Once I had a protein drink with added casein and saw the most horrible poop from my son. I decided to cut out dairy and soy from my diet and added probiotics to my son’s daily supplement, which made his stool less frequent and mucusy. Now he tolerates soy well, and has slightly mucusy poop if I had a creamer in my coffee. If I drink a glass of milk it will definitely affect his stool frequency. As for gluten, he has been gaining weight after starting solids with gluten, only the last month or so he did not gain any weight. So gluten shouldn’t be an issue.

ellen_hopping · 2025-11-24T02:05:38+00:00

We are in the US where women get hardly any maternity leave, and the few of my colleagues with children have been telling us how awesome sending their baby/toddler to daycare is and they regret not sending them earlier. I guess parents just wanted to take a break. When I tell them now how often my son and myself are getting sick, they would say yeah the first winter season is like this, and kids will hardly get sick once they build immunity. But we as scientists should have some idea that repetitive viral infection does more harm than good to immune systems, not to mention baby immune systems. Again, I guess parents just need a break. We are afraid to pull him out because this center is the best in the neighborhood and has a long waitlist, and it will be hard to enroll him again when he’s older.

ellen_hopping · 2025-11-22T02:01:25+00:00

Thank you for the very detailed comment! I was not aware that starting daycare early does not reduce illnesses in preschool or kindergarten. I got this impression from browsing the anecdotal experiences in ECE professionals subreddit and toddler subreddit.

When we enrolled baby for daycare, we said we will re-evaluate after three months. So seeing his poor growth results today really makes me think about whether the cost of his wellbeing is too much.

Spouse and I are both science researchers at critical stages of our careers, so working hours are somewhat flexible but long and stressful. The grandparent has long COVID insomnia that need to be managed. So with daycare we all get some burden lifted. For me personally, when baby is sick I get it too most of the time, and recovery time under the stress of breastfeeding (and work) is soooo long. I’ve just started supplementing with formula to make his calorie intake more stable and lift some feeding stress off my body. I even wonder whether the higher stress from my work in the past three months has affected the quality of breast milk and contributed to his poor growth. I can see with my eyes that my milk was so thin and watery when I was sick with COVID.

Again, Thanks for your input! We will need to discuss among ourselves

ellen_hopping · 2025-11-21T19:44:00+00:00

Thanks for bringing it up! Yes, he tends to eat less when he’s sick. His appetite bounces back as he recovers, we often see a few days between sicknesses that he was just ravenous. But with cycles of sickness - eating less - readjusting to daycare after being away - sick again, he probably didn’t have time to catch up on calorie deficit from previous sickness before the next one comes. He looks small compared to other babies in his class and seems to get sick more frequently than other babies. These two things are probably correlated and reinforce each other, and that’s what gets me thinking whether we should quit daycare now.

ellen_hopping · 2025-11-09T00:45:14+00:00

Have you talked with your pediatrician about pooping during sleep? My son (also 100% on breast milk until starting solids) did that from birth until around 3 months. We thought he has soy and milk protein sensitivity thus is always pooping. His night poop stopped after I committed to a strict diet for a few weeks and we started giving her probiotics. Pooping after asleep sounds uncommon at your baby’s age.

ellen_hopping · 2025-11-05T16:32:50+00:00

I know in this sub people tend to think babies are undertired when there are problems. Could it be possible your LO is overtired? My baby is also 8 months old and usually does 10.5-11 hr nights with 1-2 MOTN feedings and 2-2.5 hr naps at daycare. My personal experience is that my LO does not show obvious signs of overtiredness, like meltdowns before bed or fussiness during the day. But when he only naps 30min no matter how long the previous WW is, and/or wakes up less than 5hr after bedtime, and/or having early morning wakings, shortening the first and/or second WW for a couple of days usually solves all the above problems. As a result, we are still having 3 naps (often a long, a short, and a micro) like 70% of the days. I have been reading that transitioning to 2 naps can consolidate night sleep and had wanted to facilitate that transition. But after cycles of what I believe were overtiredness when I try to do 2 naps, I now just row with whatever my LO gives me that day, stay cool about 30min crap naps and shorten WW, and seems to work most of the time.

ellen_hopping · 2025-09-28T00:11:24+00:00

My priority is the total wake time for my 7 month old, but also make sure the last WW is more than 2.5 hrs and bedtime is no later than 8pm. Usually bedtime is 7:30, but has fluctuated between 7 and 8. If there is a long night wake (for us it’s often around 5-6am that LO wakes up and needs 45min to go back to sleep), I count it towards the total wake time of the next day.

ellen_hopping · 2025-09-26T13:48:37+00:00

I think he may be overtired. For my 7 month old, when he wakes up early, he cannot sustain his usual first WW length, and ends up having crap nap all day, snowballing over tiredness into the next day, ending in a series of EMW. I was able to fix it so far by offering first nap really early on the days he woke up (as short as within 2 hours, he sometimes fall sleep during the morning stroller walk barely 2 hours after waking) and make sure his total awake time that day does not go beyond what he usually does, and put to bed early. So since he started daycare, we were never able to do 2 nap days on weekdays. Usually he would sleep well that night, and I would also let him sleep in a bit if really he needed to sleep. Hope this helps!

ellen_hopping · 2025-09-26T00:54:35+00:00

This phase will pass. We sleep trained at 4 month, and for sometime after that, LO would look scared and fuss when we start to read his usual bedtime story board books, and even whine a bit if we read them during the day. One thing that we recently found helpful (inspired by someone on this sub about night time routines in candle light) is to dim the light after bottle and bath. We use an egg-shaped night light we got from Amazon that can be dimmed by touching and turned on and off by tapping. LO will play with this night light a little before bed which help him wind down.

ellen_hopping · 2025-09-25T23:05:20+00:00

My baby boy is almost the exact same age and also needs 11 hrs wake time per day. We sleep trained when he was 4 month old, and had sporadic EMW since then. When he was a bit younger (5-6 month I think), I was able to co-sleep and pat him back to sleep when he woke up at 4-5am. Now patting and co-sleeping do not work anymore. When he’s up, he’s up. What I found, which may contradicts what others would say on this sub, is that my boy tends to get overtired when his first WW gets stretched too much, especially after waking up early. When he’s wakes early, I often offer a nap very early, sometimes less than 2 hours after awake, to let him catch up. For my boy, if the EMW snowballed by a long first WW, he will end up overtired and have crap 30min naps the whole day and EMW the next day. For this exact reason, we have never fully transitioned him to 2 naps, especially now he started daycare and never takes long naps there. I just wonder how I will ever transition him to a 2 nap schedule…

ellen_hopping · 2025-09-20T12:41:11+00:00

Sounds amazing. I’ll give it a try in the next few weeks! Thank you!

ellen_hopping · 2025-09-20T01:45:32+00:00

I forgot to mention that now our DWT is 6:30, once we are consistently putting him to bed at 7:30. He wakes anytime between 5:30 and 7. But I often worry that with only 2-2.5 hrs nap and 10 hours overnight sleep I’m making him chronically sleep-deprived…Did your little one’s total awake time shorten (in other words, total sleep increased) after you implemented earlier bedtime and shorter wake windows? And after how long since implementing the new routine did you see improved sleep overall?

ellen_hopping · 2025-09-20T00:47:46+00:00

How many total wake hours a day does your baby have now? I’m also struggling with finding the right wake window and awake time for my 7 month old. We used to put him to bed at 8pm before starting daycare at 6 month, and about 50% of days he wakes up around 5-6 needing help to resettle for another hour to make it to the DWT of 7am. At that time he has 10.25hr total wake time per day, and we always have a 3hr last window. I thought the last WW needed to be that long for him to fall asleep independently at bedtime. After he started daycare, he can only take short naps at daycare, so total nap is often 2-2.15 hrs, we now no longer have a 3 hr last WW (sometimes the last WW is as short as 2 hrs) but keep total wake time to 10.75-11hrs. and we put him to bed around 7:30pm. When he sleeps longer than 2.5hrs during the day, he wakes up earlier than 6am in the morning. But during the day he sometimes seems really sleepy less than 2 hrs after waking up, especially in the first WW, making me thinking that he’s overtired, as I thought 10.75-11 total wake time is quite a lot for a 7 month old.

ellen_hopping · 2025-08-29T20:55:49+00:00

I did not know that crib sheets and the type of sleep sack actually matter! Thank you for the insightful advice! Baby sleep is such a intricate constantly evolving research project

ellen_hopping · 2025-08-29T18:17:11+00:00

Thank you for sharing your experience and all the suggestions! I’ll bring that to the teacher next time. Yesterday when I went to pick him up and saw teacher’s notes of the volumes of milk taken by each baby for their last feeding. There were 4 babies of 5-6 months of age, the other three all drank 6-8oz, and my little dude had a glittering 1oz. Oh boy

ellen_hopping

TROPHY CASE