We are conducting a sleep boot camp, of sorts. For McKinley, we have methodically transitioned her into a toddler bed. We first attempted a night-time trial run, after telling her the entire afternoon what a big girl she would be. While we tucked her in she began to frown, and as soon as we turned our backs to leave the room she bursted into tears. Needless to say, she slept in her crib that night. About a week later, we decided we would try again, but this time during her nap. There were a few tears after closing her bedroom door, but we waited it out knowing there was nothing for her to be afraid of during the daytime. She quickly discovered that she was free to get out of her bed and began to grab for the monitor on the window sill. All it took was one tiny pep talk about "staying in her toddler bed" and "going to sleep" and she had mastered the nap. A week ago we revisited night time sleep in her toddler bed. It is going so well, minus the nappy pillow hair she wakes up with. She has taken our initial pep talk to the extreme and remains lying in her bed either singing or talking after she awakes. She has also stopped wetting through her diaper. Yeah!
I captured Munch waking up from a nap.
Can't nap without her favorites: Sheepy & bus book.
Wake-y wake-y, eggs and bake-y!
On to Piper cub. Oh child...where do I begin? Having two kiddos has really taught me what worked for one doesn't necessarily work for the other. For example....the Babywise approach to infant sleep management. We used the principles described in the aforementioned book with McKinley, beginning at two weeks of age. I won't bore anyone with the nitty gritty details of this controversial approach, but to summarize, Babywise consists of two parts. The first being a continual, daytime rotation of eating, wake time and sleep, specifically in that order. The second part centers around the actual sleep training, which sometimes includes a little bit of crying. For Piper, there was no such thing as a little bit of crying. So, from early on, we have rocked, bounced or swayed her to sleep and had disregarded teaching her to self-soothe. At three months she began sleeping though the night, not every night, but enough for us to be confident that she didn't need to eat during the middle of the night. When she started to whimper or cry, for fear of waking up McKinley or Dadda on his work nights, I would pick her up and bounce her back to sleep. But, at four months, we evicted her from our room and have ceased comforting her in the middle of the night. For the past week, she has done surprisingly well. The first night she cried for thirty minutes around midnight, and since then, if she does wake up, she soothes herself back to sleep rather quickly. Sometimes, we don't hear a peep until I wake her up at 7 am. Night time sleep - check. Piper's next order of business is teaching her to put herself asleep for nap time. Standby for a SITREP.
Pretty in blue.
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