Lack of Sleep

Daniel has not been sleeping as well recently. He likes to wake up at some point in the night and stay up for a couple hours. Not the best habit if you ask Matt and me. We have decided to set some ground rules. Now, I can't say they are the best guidelines since we came up with them in the middle of the night while listening to a crying baby, but at least we have guidelines. Hopefully it will be better than our typical debate that we have when Daniel wakes up in the middle of the night.

Rule 1 - Daniel only gets fed once between the time he goes down and 4 am.

Rule 2 - Daniel has to sleep in his crib until at least 4 am.

Well, I started this post yesterday or maybe even Thursday. Last night we did some reading about sleep methods. We decided to use the method recommended in the book "The New First Three Years of Life" by Burton L. White. It is a pretty strict method, but I'm convinced that Daniel is waking up more for company than anything else. He recommends going in, checking on the baby, changing the diaper if necessary, and leaving for 30 minutes. If the baby is still upset afer 30 minutes, he recommends checking the baby again, and if everything is ok leaving and not coming back. As a parent, I can say this is not an easy thing to do, but after a week of spending much time awake each night, we needed to do something.

Last night Daniel went to bed as usual. But he woke up at midnight in a fit. Matt went in, change him, and put him back down. We sat there listening to Daniel cry for a little while, but I must say that knowing we were not going back in for 30 minutes let me rest a little. Daniel wasn't in any sort of distress, he just needed to get back to sleep. He finally fell asleep after about 20 minutes and slept until 6 am. After I fed him, he actually fell back asleep until 8:30 am. I guess he was tired, too. Last night was definitely an improvement on the sleeping front. Hopefully, he will get better at settling back down, but we need to be past the days of rocking to sleep at midnight, 1 am, 2 am, ...

We also have to work on him falling asleep unassisted at naptime. I attempted this a couple times today, but then I decided that he just needed a nap and rocked him to sleep. We will try self-soothing tomorrow.

Here is a little video of him moving around and babbling. "Dada" is a regular in his vocabulary these days.