Zoe has always been a good sleeper, so I started to slightly panic last week when her sleep pattern abruptly changed. She suddenly wasn’t interested in being bounced or sung to sleep at  night, and she started to wake up in the middle of the night and cry – something she hadn’t done since she was quite small. It was also taking her up to an hour to get back to sleep after a crying episode, when it used to take her closer to 5 or 10 minutes.

Q and I got our heads together and determined that we needed to be better about keeping her on a schedule. Maintaining her morning and afternoon naps hadn’t been a problem, but we hadn’t been very consistent about bedtime. We decided that we would establish a bedtime ritual; we would feed and read to her at 8 PM every night, with a goal of getting her to sleep (or, at least in her crib) by 8:30 PM. We also decided to be better at letting her cry a bit – with the hope that she would learn to self sooth. (I hate letting her cry, but I know it’s something that has to be done – at least for a few minutes.)

We kicked off the new schedule last Friday night, and I’m happy to report that things have gone swimmingly. She woke up and fussed a bit the first two nights, but ever since she has slept right on through until 7 AM – when we wake her up. Q and I have gotten around 8 hours of sleep every night this week, and I can’t tell you how refreshed that makes us feel!

-M

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 9:36 am and is filed under 07.Four to five months. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.