The Sleep Saga Continues...

I am currently conducting the Nicky Naptime Experiment. I am trying to figure out when to try to schedule his naps so we can get him on a more regular bedtime. For now, I am just observing his spontaneous naps so I can go with what he’s already doing but just tweak it a bit.

I thought for sure after last night, I'd have quite a day today with a grumpy ole Nicky. He fell asleep at 7:30pm last night, which I should have known was too early for him (usually its more like 9pm which is a bit late), and Scott put him down in his co-sleeper when he looked to be in a deep sleep. Thirty minutes later, he was up again and stayed up until 10:30pm. After that it was cat nap, wake up and scream, drift off, scream, etc. until I got him down for good around 12:30am. I don't know what happened. Maybe his naps yesterday screwed him up or maybe we missed his tired signals and didn't get him settled down before he became overtired. So, like I said, today I expected a crabby baby.

But, I got him to sleep this morning til 9am (his usual wake-up time right now - I am hoping to work him back to an earlier wake up time and thus an earlier bedtime) and he woke up happy as can be. He went down for his first nap at 10:30 and slept an hour, then went down again at 12:30 which was earlier than expected, but I'm not fighting him on it. He's been sleeping for an hour and a half now, and I will let him go 2 hours before I wake him up. Then hopefully he'll be up for a few hours before taking a third nap. The problem is that he is such a restless sleeper. He moves around both because of his startle response and because of his gassiness. He is really fighting the swaddling so that isn’t as good of an option anymore. He still kind of needs it, though, so I am experimenting with wrapping him up in a bigger blanket but loosely so it holds his arms back a bit but isn’t a full fledged swaddle. It seemed to help today. It kept him from hitting himself in the head and when he broke free of it a few times, I caught it early enough and wrapped the blanket back around him before he woke himself up… I just try to check on him to make sure he doesn’t push the blanket up onto his face. I can’t wait until my child is able to sleep peacefully.

Its now later in the evening and I am very confused. Nicky has been sleeping too much overall today. He woke up right after I wrote the last few paragraphs, was up for an hour or so, and went down again, this time for 2 ½ hours. He woke up at 5pm and went back down now at 7pm. I am very worried he won’t sleep well tonight because he has slept too much today. I swear this is too hard! It impossible to keep him up if he’s tired – he gets super crabby and won’t go to sleep later when you want him to. And if I just let him sleep when he wants to, he will sleep too much during the day like today and then won’t be tired enough at night to sleep the 10 hours he is supposed to be sleeping in the evening at this age.

Anyway, I am going to keep observing and recording for the rest of the week. Next week I will try to push him toward more of a schedule. My hope is that I can get him to an 8pm-6 or 7am night schedule and three 1-1 ½ or maybe 2 hour naps during the rest of the day. We’ll see if he’s ready for that yet. Honestly, if he needs something else that’s fine with me. I just want to make sure he starts getting more quality sleep so he is happy when he is awake. He is such a grump when he wakes up before he’s rested. Here’s hoping the experiment yields some useful data.