Naptime

For the past few weeks, I've been spending a lot of time with my friend, Cori, who is a brand new mom. Baby Brady is almost 6 weeks old. Seeing such a small baby, brings back a lot of memories (although it wasn't that long ago). We have taken our boys on a few outings these past few weeks. Brady has slept through several trips to the mall and yesterday slept through a movie. All his sleeping made me think about how different Cole's naps are now then they used to be.

Like any newborn, when Cole was brand new, he would sleep anywhere and through anything. He'd fall asleep on his playmat or in his bouncer or even while eating. Nothing was sweeter than holding my tiny newborn while he slept. (Okay, I lied... falling asleep myself while snuggling my newborn was actually the best). Somewhere around 3 months, Cole started to refuse to let us put him down to sleep. He would fall asleep in my arms and wake as soon as I tried to put him down. My mother will swear that this is because I held him too much while he slept. However, many experts agree that babies that young cannot form habits. Eventually he got through that stage, but not without a lot of frustration.


For the first few months of Cole's life, there was no rhyme or reason to when he'd fall asleep or for how long. At some point, I started to really pay attention to Cole's sleepy cues. I would look for yawns or eye rubbing and know that meant he needed a nap. He started sleeping on a pretty consistent schedule. One hour of wakefulness was all he could handle. This seems wonderful, doesn't it? Well it wasn't! Since Cole wouldn't fall asleep on his own and needed to be bounced to sleep, every few hours I would be bouncing him (more like doing squats) for 20 minutes or so, until he fell asleep. Then I would try to lay him down without him waking up. More often than not, he'd wake up and scream and I'd start the whole process over again. I was also using the EASY routine at this point. Eat, Activity, Sleep, You time(time for Mom while baby sleeps). This really helped keep our day structured.

Around 6 months, we went to a two hours of wakefulness schedule. Shortly after that we started sleep training (see "Sleepless Nights" post) and we no longer had to bounce Cole to sleep. He was taking 3 naps a day and finally sleeping through the night.

We have recently gone to a 2,3,4 nap schedule. Cole goes down for his first nap 2 hours after he wakes up for the day and his 2nd nap 3 hours after he wakes from his 1st nap. 4 hours after he wakes from his 2nd nap is bedtime. This is working sooo well! At nap time, I read him story, sing him a little song, put him in his crib and turn on his crib aquarium. By the time the aquarium stops playing music, he is out!

Although Cole has never been a long napper, he tends to take shorter catnaps (this has gotten better with our new 2,3,4 schedule), I feel so thankful that I finally have a baby that can lay in the crib and fall asleep on his own. It wasn't an easy road, but it was certainly worth it!

Sleep books that we used:
Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, by Marc Weissbluth

Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, by Richard Ferber

The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems, by Tracy Hogg, Melinda Blau (not actually a sleep book, but this is where EASY comes from)