A Ray of Hope

I meant to write yesterday, but I was too tired. Here was my night from 3 nights ago:

7pm -- Put Sahana to bed

7:15pm -- Read stories to Paras

8pm -- Paras has a poop -- change diaper

9pm -- Try to go to bed early

9:48pm -- Andy calls and wakes me up (by accident)

10pm -- Sahana starts crying, 30 minutes before she's supposed to be fed

10:06pm -- Sahana goes back to sleep (on her own -- yay!)

10:30pm -- Feed Sahana

11:30pm -- Paras is wailing from a nightmare while I'm trying to burp Sahana. Put Sahana to bed without a burp and go help Paras calm down and go back to sleep

11:45pm -- Go to bed

1am -- Paras has another nghtmare. Get up to comfort him

2:19 am -- Sahana wakes up earlier than normal. Go get her back to sleep until her normal feeding time of at least 3:30am

3am -- Go back to bed

3:30am -- Sahana up on the dot to be fed

4:15 -- Put Sahana down after feeding and burping her

6:45 -- Get up to get bottle (and my coffee) in time for Sahana's 7am wake up


So, you say, I must have gotten a 2 1/2 hour sleep in that last stretch. Wrong. After getting up so much all night, I was too wired by 4:15 to really get to sleep. So I was dead tired all the next day.

The other night, though, things got better. Sahana woke up earlier than her 3:30am feed again, so as usual I went to put her back down to see if she could eke out another 30 minutes. (For the non-parents out there, by the way, it's a rule of thumb that once the baby is sleeping until certain time at night, you want to avoid feeding them if they suddenly start getting up earlier, as then they will just make it a habit of getting up at the earlier time again.) Anyway, I put her back down around 3 am, got her bottle ready, and went to bed waiting for her to start crying. She slept until 6am without waking up! (I still didn't get any sleep, since I was on edge waiting for her to get up and also wondering whether she was still alive.) So it's nice to know she is capable of going through the night without a feed, though she hasn't done it enough for it to really be a pattern. In fact, she woke up at 4am last night -- which is an improvement over her previous 3:30 am streak.

So, I have a ray of hope. I remember that Paras slept through the night once, and then went back to waking up, but within two weeks of his first all-nighter, he was sleeping through regularly. So I am hoping that maybe by around 8 weeks Sahana will have gotten the habit of sleeping all night. My friend Lauren sent me some excerpts from a sleep book that says that 8 weeks is when babies start calming down anyway, so hopefuly it will all come together. I the meantime, I need a nap.