Sleep structure

After I posted at midnight last Tuesday about our struggles with Laurel's sleep, have you been wondering what happened? Are you wondering if our "new strategy" of letting her stay up late until she got really sleepy was a success?

No! It was a total disaster!

But we have since had success. Tonight makes the seventh consecutive night of an easy bedtime prior to 9:00 p.m.

What happened first, however, was that we experimented with a lack of sleep structure: no more trying to put her to bed at a predetermined bedtime, no more waking her up after we thought she had slept enough. Free range baby! So for five nights, last Sunday through Thursday, she stayed up very late. She fell asleep at 11:00 p.m. most of those nights, but only after much exhausted crying and a few false attempts at getting her to sleep. When allowed to wake up on her own, she slept until 9:30 a.m. every morning (which made it impossible to get Isaac to preschool on time). And when allowed to nap as much as she wanted during the day, she ended up sleeping nearly two hours in the late afternoon, pushing her bedtime back even further.

If she had been sleeping well at night, however, all would have been forgiven, and we might have let the experiment continue. But in the morning she was waking up exhausted and crabby; although she was getting up late, it wasn't late enough to compensate for her even-later bedtime. And, even more unforgivably, she began waking up at night. This is a child who is perfectly capable of sleeping through the night, but on the final night of the experiment, she woke up more than seven times. She only slept nine hours, many of them while being held.

So I decided to try the opposite approach: extreme sleep structure!

Give or take 15 minutes, here are the sleep-related details of Laurel's schedule for the last six days:

8:15 a.m. -- wake her up
12:45 p.m. -- nurse to sleep
1:00 p.m. -- nap
2:15 p.m. -- wake her up
8:30 p.m. -- nurse to sleep
8:45 p.m. -- sleep

The main difference from her previous schedule is that I pushed the nap further back than she would like. She still gets really sleepy about two hours after waking up, but if she is allowed to nap that early in the day, she gets overtired by evening and has a hard time falling asleep at bedtime. And if she has two naps, she has a hard time falling asleep at bedtime. And if she naps for more than an hour and 15 minutes, she has a hard time falling asleep at bedtime! So we're trying a shorter nap right in the center of the day.

Man, it's hard to wake her up from that nap, though. An hour goes by too fast. But the reason she has such a short nap is that she sleeps so long at night, so I guess I shouldn't complain. Also, I know I shouldn't complain about a baby who wants to sleep past 8:00 a.m.!

- - - - -

This is not the first time we've instituted a structured sleep schedule. We did it with Isaac when he was two years old, and it also involved the fixed wake-up time. Really, you can't control what time your kid falls asleep -- you can only control what time they wake up, and hope the rest falls into place.

Of course, soon Daylight Savings Time will begin, and we will have to readjust all over again.