Nap Training

Here I am at 2:30pm sitting down to eat a lunch that's been waiting for me for an hour now. I'm typing this with one hand because my other one is tucked under a sleeping 2 month old. The three year old is sleeping like the pro she is. She wasn't always an awesome sleeper though. Why do babies hate sleep? I will never know. That's why I'm giving Reagan the same treatment her sister got that turned her into an awesome sleeper.

Early on babies sleep all willy-nilly with no real schedule, but eventually for everyone's benefit, a schedule is necessary. Both of my girls started to develop a sleeping pattern on their own at which point I took the opportunity to solidify it. My strategy is simple. If you take the same nap every day for enough consecutive days, your body will not only be ready for that nap at that time of day, but will need it. But its not just as easy as putting the baby in bed at the same time each day. If I do that, she sleeps about 20 minutes before she begins squirming, farting, fussing, and is wide awake again. I could spend another 20 minutes getting her back to sleep so she could sleep another 20 minutes, but by then she's coming up on the next feeding time and it gets kind of pointless. Therefore, I hold the baby for as long as she'll sleep. For Reagan this afternoon nap has been as long as 3 hours, but often goes at least 2. After 3-4 days, she passes out right on time and sleeps pretty solidly for about 2 hours.

I am so looking forward to the predictability of a baby on a good napping schedule, the benefits of which include getting back to my regular cleaning & workout routines and obviously a better rested, more content baby :)

While we're waiting for all that, I got YouTube Capture on my phone which makes it much easier to share videos here. So, for your viewing pleasure, here is Carsen playing with two Wall-E toys this morning...

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWwkRDgFgB4?rel=0]

*Disregard the fact that it's sideways. It was in landscape-only mode and I recorded in portrait - oops!