Friday, February 08, 2008

Sleep Schedule

Darcy has always been a great sleeper. If you put her in bed, she goes to sleep, no problem. I've talked about how she'll now get out of bed on her own, but she's 3 1/2 years old. It's going to have to happen eventually.

Wesley on the other hand, is a bit different. He's been sleeping through the night (sometimes wakes up to play for a few minutes) for a while now, but his night wouldn't start until between 10:30 -11:00. That meant by the time I got to bed it would be 11:30 - midnight. He could sleep until 10:00 but Darcy still got up at 7:00ish so I wasn't getting the sleep I needed. He's also not a great napper during the day.

I did a baby sleep test online the other day and it recommended some changes to his schedule that might make things better. I'm now waking him at 8:00 in the morning if he's not already awake. I'm moving his bedtime back 15 minutes every couple of days. Last night I started his bedtime routine at 9:30 and it seemed to work well. In a couple of days we'll try 9:15, then 9:00 and so on until we get to around 8:00.

Even with getting up earlier in the morning he still isn't a great napper. Babies are supposed to nap after 2-3 hours of awake time. I got him up shortly after 8:00 yesterday morning and he didn't nap until 4:00 in the afternoon. I tried and tried to get him to sleep but no luck. He just cried and screamed and kept Nick and Darcy awake (Nick was sleeping in preparation for a midnight shift) so I gave up after half an hour of trying.

I'm really going to be working on this over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully we can get him started on a better schedule that will make life easier for all of us!

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

Ouch. Not easy for the little guy to understand what he needs to do.

Strangely enough, the sleep schedule thing sounds a lot like what I had to do get myself on track. While I still do get bad sleep at times (this past week, for example) on the whole I can actually now say I'm a good sleeper.

Good luck with Wesley.

1:54 PM  

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