Sunday, February 28, 2010

Working on a Happy Sleep Schedule

Up to this point Angela has made a very natural and relatively easy transition into an acceptable sequence of night feedings/sleeping. We've gone from struggling to get her to bed before midnight and being up for periods of 30 minutes up to 2 hours during the middle of the night as a newborn, to a 10:30pm-8:30am routine and then 8:30/9:00pm-7:30am. However the past two days (seems like since she's really grasped the sense that she can sit up on her own now and that this is so much more fun than lying back) she woke up at 3am once and didn't go back to sleep till 5am and then this morning woke up at 6am with no desire to go back to bed.

I do not own any baby books, or specifically any baby-sleep books, but it seems that the idea is - sleep promotes more sleep and to not delay putting down a baby at the earliest signs of sleepiness.

So tonight I noticed Angela was getting a little cranky before 7 and decided to start winding her down & get her ready for bed (changed her diaper, put her nightgown on, brought her downstairs - read some books, nursed her & then brought her into the bathroom because she likes the sound of the shower and held her with her head on my shoulder and sang "The Ants Go Marching"). By 7:30 I had her in bed and was doing my exercises downstairs. She's fussed a few times but now at 9:45 is still asleep. We'll see how things pan out tomorrow morning.

Naps are another issue all together - many days I know that she's tired and needs a nap but I have a much harder time getting her to lie down and when she finally does many times the nap only lasts 20-40 minutes and she's up and raring to go! I'm thinking of applying a nap routine just like her bedtime routine to see how things go.

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