Sleep Up to Eight Weeks

My spiffy new cell phone has a blogger app so now I can post to the blog without having to go through the trouble of getting out thee old laptop. So cool!
Gabriel's sleep up to now has brought us little more than confusion and frustration. Our time in the hospital is a blur filled with much chest sleeping on G's part. Once home, we continued with what we knew. By the time G was two weeks old, we were exhausted.
Knowing that something had to change, we tried to move him to his co-sleeper. It didn't go over well; he cried so often we ended up holding him all night anyway.
When we were preparing our lives for G, we weren't comfortable with him alone in another room having decided we wanted the benefits of being attached parents and overnight parenting, specifically a lower incidence of SIDS. However, we didn't want him in our bed for safety reasons so we opted for the bedside bassinet. We wanted him near but wanted to maintain some boundaries.
By the time we reached this point in our sleep journey, we were totally down with bed-sharing (we enjoyed the nighttime convenience and peace of mind) having him super close but wanted a safer option. At Babies R Us we found a product called a "nest" that was basically a little pod that rested on the bed so he could safely share our bed.
He stayed in his nest successfully until he was around six weeks. At that time we opted to move him out of our bed and into his bassinet. We began this by simply placing his nest into the bassinet. He transitioned easily and didn't really know the difference. After about a week we ditched the nest entirely.
Our huge struggle now was getting him to sleep and getting him to stay asleep. I would nurse him to sleep and try to put him down and he'd rouse within minutes. This would happen repeatedly all night. When I'd get frustrated, David would take over, bouncing Gabe for hours. We were back to getting no sleep.
I turned to the attachment parenting guru's, Dr. Bill Sears, the Baby Sleep Book. It was here I learned how babies sleep. I learned that G was gadling asleep when I nursed him, but he want staying asleep when I put him down because I was jumping the gun. Babies sleep in two stages: light (REM) and deep. They spend about half their sleep time in light sleep while we only spend 1/5 of our sleep time there. I was simply waking him up when I put him down! All I had to do was wait about twenty minutes and he'd be in deep sleep. I began to do this and it works most of the time.
Most recently, in pursuit of regular naptimes, I also read the famous Happiest Baby on the Block. This book has done wonders for our sleep! The book is built on the foundation of the fourth trimester, which I fully agree with. The fourth trimester is the observation that most mammals are born relatively self-sufficient except a few like humans and kangaroos, which need a little more time to develop outside the womb. Thus the three months following standard gestation should be spent giving Baby a gentle transition to life outside the womb by nursing on cue, sleeping close to one another, and baby wearing.
The book touts the "five s's" of baby sleep strategies: swaddling, side laying, shhing, swinging, and sucking. Long story short, we recently began implementing these strategies and have seen dramatic improvements in falling asleep and staying asleep, especially during naps.
For example, last night G slept for four hours and then intermittently for the subsequent four - waking to nurse and rapidly falling back to sleep. Then, this afternoon, he slept for two hours straight in his swing. I was actually able to put him down (swaddled, post nursing, in deep sleep) and get some stuff done around the house.
It's so nice to finally be making progress with our little guy! :)