Once your baby is older than 2 weeks, you won't need to wake him up to eat because he will always let you know when he is hungry with loud wails and incessant kicks. But since you are dealing with a 3 days old infant, it is important to wake him up to feed him because at that age, he only knows when and how to sleep-which is always. But before we delve into how to wake your baby up, note the two important points below:
- Do not allow bright lights in the room. New babies have high sensitivity to bright lights, and the light can force him to keep his eyes tightly shut.
- During REM sleep, wake him up. You can easily recognize this light sleep stage through your baby's fluttering eyelids, clenched fists, and sleep grins. It is much harder to wake a baby when he is in a deep sleep.
That said, below are some effective ways to wake up your sleeping little angel:
- For a start, begin gentler, kinder techniques like singing, talking, stimulating your baby, picking him up, moving his feet and arms, talking to him, tickling him, maintaining eye contact with him, anything that works to wake him.
- Before giving him the natural juice, consider changing his diaper. Most newborn babies don't like this, and it will anger him enough to become fully awake. Switch breasts whenever he slows down his sucking rate.
- Hold him straight. Raise his shoulders, legs, torso, and bend him into a sit-up position on your lap. Repeat this after a while. Be careful not to raise up his legs when he is in a sitting position to avoid causing him any internal damage. You should be gentle in all the moves, you know how fragile he still is.
- When everything fails, you can take it a step further by wiping its face with cool, damp towel or giving him a bath. Do not resort to the bathing approach except when the baby is due for a bath and has not eaten for a while. In all these it is important to make sure you do not use any measure of force in any way in order not to hurt the baby.
- Do not get tired of waking your baby until he has sucked the breast milk for at least ten minutes. If he falls asleep while feeding, wake him up and place him on the other breast. When he is done feeding, you can let him sleep off on your chest with his tongue still licking your nipples. This innocent action force the hormones responsible for manufacturing breast milk to go into action.
The actions and techniques described above on how to wake a sleeping baby is given with the belief that you have a healthy infant in your hands. Inasmuch as it can be quite difficult to wake a sleeping baby, babies who fail to respond to much efforts may need some urgent medical help.