Sleep Pattern — Before and After

by Eve, in Parenting (No Comments)

It looks like the bones of the Sleep Dragon can be laid to rest by those of the Colic Dragon, and the villagers may once again live in peace and joy.

I’ve been keeping a digital record of Timmy’s sleep patterns for a couple of months now, and it still baffles me sometimes when I see the obvious leap from Bad to Better sleep, following the jump-in-the-deep-end sleep training described in my last post. (For those interested, I’m using this fantastic app, which also collects data and generates stats and graphs for a baby’s feeding, nappies, height and weight. It allegedly can make a video of photo ‘memories’ too, but I haven’t tried it.)

As the last three weeks of graphed sleep data show (click to enlarge), Timmy’s sleep was always perforated and irregular; just plain nasty, really.

We began training him to put himself back to sleep on Monday night of the last week, and as seen, by Wednesday night I could have quality uninterrupted time with my electric blanket.

Now he knows that bedtime is 7-to-7. I try to have him in bed around 7pm (and most nights am successful), and will only get him out after 7am. If he wakes up earlier, that’s fine — he can just play with his toes until breakfast time.

Now all that remains on the journey to child-raising bliss (at least until he starts teething!) is getting the daytime naps sorted into some form of regularity, so I know when I can slot other things into my day. Ideally he’d nap for two hours — it would work well, having two of them a day (see Thursday on the last week) — but babies have no respect for ideals. So with his naps typically shorter than that, the routine gets a bit messy. If he has two sleeps, he’s overtired in the evening. If he has three, he’s not ready for the night stretch until later than I’d like him to be up.

Perhaps there’s nothing I can do about that one. Or have I just not thought of it? It seems appropriate to modify a turn of phrase about a horse and water, to: you can lead a baby to bed, but you can’t make him sleep.