Saturday, November 24, 2007

The Great Sleep Experiment - 10 day results

It has been 10 days since we started our no-cry sleep solution experiment. Actually, it has been 11 days, but Thursday was such an unusual and busy day that we didn't think it would be a fair test of how we were doing. We did our sleep logs last night, and from the pure numbers, it doesn't really look like things are improving:

Asleep time - 7:45 p.m.
Awake time - 6:10 a.m.
Total wakings - 5
Longest sleep span - 2 hrs 30 min
Total sleep - 9 hrs

However, we have made some progress. She now sleeps most of the night in her crib, rather than spending part of the night cuddling on the floor with Daddy. I put her in her bouncy chair after her last waking, since she tends to have trouble going back down after that and we have decided that getting her quantity of sleep up is more important than getting her out of the bouncy chair. Also, several of the wakings require only that we give her the binky and a few pats in the crib, rather than picking her up. Last night, we only had to pick her up on wakings when she ended up eating. The average time to get back to sleep is down to 17 minutes from 20 minutes, and that is skewed high due to a long session where Daddy was trying to get her down without her bottle for 20 minutes before finally giving up and letting her have her bottle. Three of the other four wakings required nothing more than a binky and a few pats, and she was back to sleep in five minutes or less.

We need to revisit our plan and decide what, if anything, needs adjusting. The idea that has worked the best for us is an idea that was actually proposed for extending nap time: to be there ready with the binky or whatever calming techniques work to get the baby right back to sleep if she wakes up "too early". We've been doing this for her first waking (which used to be 1 hour 45 minutes after she went down) and have had some success in getting her to sleep through this waking some nights.

I'll post again in another 10 days!

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