bedtime

I think we've been very lucky with A & T - no great traumas early on, generally good sleepers as babies.

Of course, now they're a little older, it gets a lot more complicated. A lot of bargaining goes on. You can never tell whether a day of outdoorsy activity will leave them shattered and ready to zzzz upon contact with pillow or wind them up so much they won't let you leave the room. A bath sometimes soothes...and sometimes doesn't. We try to maintain a routine but it's just a lottery.

At the moment, I try to get them upstairs by 7:30 (bath every other night). Ava can undress and dress herself (if she feels like it, but you're adding another 10min there). Lulu loves the milk/bunny/pyjamas/nappy change routine and usually falls asleep while I'm in the middle of my first book (I nominally read to both, but I'm at Ava's bedside and Lulu's in her cot, so she can't actually see the book; on the occasions when Lulu joins us for the story, I can't get her into her cot).

It's usually three books chosen from the rotating cast of a dozen or so in Ava's bedside cabinet (she has milk too) and then a couple of improvised stories where she does the outline and I flesh it out. Ava likes people being in grave danger/trapped/covered in poo at the moment. If it's been a school (nursery) day, then Ava will have borrowed a book from their library and I'll write up what she thought of it (she's wise to my box-ticking methods - "Yes, I would read it again...THIS is my favourite picture...and I liked it when THIS happened") and she'll illustrate it with a picture (my favourite so far: "20 boys playing football in the long grass" - a mad splurge of circles, dots and lines).

Then it's a kiss and goodnight. That's the ideal anyway. The reality is often 30min more whining and negotiation, sometime full-on tantrums, occasional bad dream interruptions and (usually) Ava crawling in with us about 2am.

okay heres something. i remember (from a lomng time ago) some expert of tv saying dont let your kid drink milk before bed because its bad for their teeth all nihgt. how can milk be bad for teeth? i thought milk was v pro-teeth.

coke, which is bad for your teeth is also bad for you keyboard when you spill a 20oz bottle on it.

Milk contains natural sugars (lactose) so if it rests against the teeth all night (ie if the kid hasn't had their teeth brushed after milk) -- and particularly if the kid has a bottle all night -- it can speed up tooth decay.

schwantz i'm still interested about when you decided to impose the bedtime. at 2 months? three? six? ten?

i have to say i don't think our dude has colic. he's just a champion fusser at times. but he sleeps real good at night (so far).

I think it was around 4 months. At that point, Ben would still wake up for a snack at 1am, but Owen would sleep through the night. However, this was when we were freaking out about Ben (he had seizures at 3 months), and Owen seemed to pick up on it, and helped us out by sleeping through the night. Once we calmed down (around 6 months), Owen started waking up again. At around 7 months, we finally did the cry-it-out routine. Turned out it only took one night, and then they were doing 7-7.

How do you actually convince yr baby to sleep? Have been putting her in the sleepsack, dimming the lights, turning down the volume, etc, around 9 p.m., but she won't sleep until after midnight unless I put her in the Snugli and go for a walk. MY LEGS ARE KILLING ME. Last night I just put her in the Snugli and walked around the apt until she drifted off. Then I sat down and promptly konked out myself for three hours.
Not a pattern I want to establish, but, man, I gotta sleep too!

How old is she? Howie used to need walking/rocking/feeding/cuddling to sleep for many months. I wouldn't worry about bad habits at this age, just do what you gotta do.

Yeah, it took a long long time before Megan would even fall asleep at a somewhat reasonable hour.

she's nine weeks. and she's actually proving to be pretty pattern-proof anyway. what works one day won't work the next. Except the Snugli. God bless it.

Also, she doesn't seem to be napping much during the day, except when her mom takes her out in the stroller or snugli. I kinda think this is affecting her ability to sack out at night, too tired to sleep, etc.
Though this week she's discovered her hand, and has at least twice calmed herself back to sleep by gnawing on it. Unfortunately, her coordination is still pretty random and she's just as like to land a finger in her eye as her mouth, which sets her off worse.

God, I don't think Howie was going to bed before 1am at nine weeks and even then he would often sleep only on my chest! And I had to walk him round the block five times a day to get him to nap (he would only nap on the move and only for 30 mins at a time, you could set your watch by it).

It won't last forever, I promise!

Do any of you cheat and take the babe for a drive in the car? I know several people who find this technique very successful.

ive done that twice. it worked once (the first time, obv.)

Howie always used to fall asleep in the car -- very handy when going to visit relatives, as we could time the journey to coincide with his nap and have peace and quiet all the way. Sadly, the last couple of times we've driven anywhere this has failed to work, as the prospect of shouting "Car! Bus! Truck!" is far too exciting to sleep through.

boys

somehow this has become a non-issue.

naptime's still a challenge but bedtime established itself as some time between 7:30 and 8, like clockwork. i have no memory of how this occurred.

how long does yr guy sleep until?
our girl settled into a regular 11pm bedtime, sleeping until a very decent hour in the am, but then my wife decided that 11 was too late for a baby to be up until, and we tapered her down to an 8pm bedtime, but then she started waking up, like really waking up at 5am, which just don't fly. So now she goes to bed between 9 and 10 and wakes up just in time for me to change a diaper and hand her off to her mom before I go to work, instead of, um getting up two hours befoer I would otherwise get up to go to work. The tradeoff, though, is that we had "free time" at the end of the day when she was going to bed at 8.

well for a couple of months we did an 11pm snack, where i'd go in with a bottle and kind of half-rouse him, enough to get it down him, and he'd go right back to sleep. then he'd wake up at 2, and again at 5, like clockwork. last week we were like hmm, let's see what happens if we skip that 11pm meal. the first night we skipped it he slept through til 6am and it's been like that for a week now. 6 is still.. sorta sucky but often he'll go back to sleep on his own til 7 which is awesome when it happens.

With O I had a pretty strict routine (she more or less handed it to us): eat at seven, wake up at eleven and then sleep till seven. She skipped the 11 pm snack at four months. Elisabeth had the wake-up-every-2/3-hours routine for more than a year. But now she goes to sleep at about 7 pm and wakes up at... EIGHT AM.

I fear when we will go to Japan next months. Urgh. Ophelia never did have a problem (only she didn't sleep much on the plane) but Elisabeth? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

how did you all transition from rocking to sleep to just leaving the kid in the crib? we still havent managed this with beeps. i really doubt it would fly with her at all.

Hmm, we did sleep training when Howie was 9 months but a two-year-old requires a different strategy, I should think. Does she have a regular bedtime routine (bath, stories, milk etc)? If so then I might be tempted to just follow the normal routine then put her to bed (with lots of explaining that she's going to sleep, you'll see her in the morning), leave the room then see what happens -- she might just surprise you. (You could practise putting her dolls to bed during the day, too.)

If this upsets her too much then you could try a 'gradual withdrawal' method, the idea of this is that you start with rocking her to sleep, then step by step over a few days at a time move slowly away from her. Eg you cuddle to sleep for a few days, then hold hands, then sit by the cot, then move closer to the door, until eventually you can leave the room while she's awake.

There is a good explanation of the gradual withdrawal method here.

Thanks, Meg! Good advice.

our dude goes to sleep on his back in the crib with a dummy and some shushing. no idea what would happen if we didn't use the dummy. chaos probably.

yeah beeps never wanted a pacifier. lord knows we tried to make her want one. probably a good thing now though.

uh oh

sleep is becoming rocky, no idea why

Is he 4/5 months?

Is he 4/5 months?

hahahaha, sounds about right! Aidan's sleep got horrendous round about this time - he was waking up every hour, drove me potty.

Yep, this was when Howie's sleep went completely haywire. I think it's partly growth spurt and partly all the developmental gubbins. I survived (just!) by co-sleeping, it seemed a bit easier to deal with when I didn't have to get out of bed.

also teeth maybe? or is that too early?

Oh god, I'd forgotten about teeth. Got to go through all that again...

I never understand why, given that people are usually all to happy to tell parents to be that they'll be shattered, the birth will be horrendous, abandon all hope ye who enter here etc. that more isn't said about how horrible teething is, and more importantly HOW LONG IT LASTS!!!! I seriously had no idea that teething would be such a protracted nightmare.

eep

care to elaborate?

Well I just thought that teeth would come in pretty quickly but it's such a drawn out process. Some kids don't seem that bothered, others go through what seems like torture. With Aidan he didn't get his first tooth until almost his first birthday and several would come in at a time, so we'd have a week or so of yucky nappies and an unhappy restless sleeping Aidan. It felt that from 11 months - 14 months was just relentless. A tooth would come through and he'd go back to his normal happy self, and it seemed like a week later we'd be back to the miserable whingey boy.

It's just something that no-one had really mentioned to us, so we didn't know to expect it

Oh yes. Up to three weeks of clinginess, moaning, manic dribbling, sleepless nights and horrific nappies, then a tooth pops through, then you get a short break then it all starts again. Repeat x 20 baby teeth until driven slightly insane.

why are the nappies crazy??

babbys get diarrhea, fevers and runny noses when teething although no doctor will admit the correlation

the official line is they get sick because their fingers are in their mouths all the time when their teeth hurt

My first pediatrician said it was bollox. Hey, whatevs, dude. Who cares about runny noses, it's all about SCREAMING in the middle of the night (and day) with no solution at all. Well, for Elisabeth. But then she pretty much did that anyway, day and night.

TH, you can never know. Ophelia pretty much slept through teething. They both were early: around 4 months but it can just as well start at 12 months. Wait until they get the molars. Honestly, I felt for Elisabeth. Imagine the pain and not understanding why. I read how it feels and me, I'd probably wanted to tear my mum's head off for creating me. Actually now I think about it, Elisabeth had that look in her eyes. heheh.

We've noticed that when Elisabeth is crying (short bursts), she actually has her eyes closed so maybe sleeps through it?

I just came on here to brag that TWICE yesterday we put Alice down awake and she fell asleep herself after only ~5 minutes of crying but now I'm feeling like I shouldn't brag because so many troubles (teething! mysterious 4/5 month grumpiness!) are just around the corner.

this is after a week of "sleep training," mind

Teething! All our hard work establishing routines and bedtimes and FUN BABY TIME dashed! Still no pearls, but O THE DROOL!
Dismantled and remantled crib in baby room about three weeks ago. Took a while, but as of the last three nights, I'm the only one bothered by it. She reliably sleeps solid from 8:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. give or take either way.
This morning, she pointed at me and said "Da-da!" and I was so proud and then she pointed at the window and said the same thing, and likewise to EVERYTHING else in our house.

pls help w/ strategies to skip middle-of-the-night feedings

going crazy here--it seemed like we were getting better, moving forward, had it down to bedtime 7/7:30, a feed at maybe 10:30pm, then 3am, then up at 7. Now she's back to waking and wanting a feed every 3 hours MAX.

What age is she?

The thing I learned (the hard way) with Howie is that infant sleep is not a linear progression of longer and longer times between wakings (except for the lucky few). Can be affected by teething, health, learning to roll/crawl/walk/whatever, heat, phases of the moon...

The other thing I learned is that everything is just a phase and will pass...

She's four months and a bit. Yeah, we seem to be learning over and over again how much/quickly she changes. And I know that there are/will be many 'steps backward' on the way to maturity. But nine feeds per twenty-four hours is a bit o_O

four months is a bad time, bad bad time. I would burst into tears just walking in the park because I was so tired and worn down by night feeds. It did pass. You just have to work out what's important to you and figure out from that what you need to do - put up with the extra feeds or do something else to try and change it.

Are you co-sleeping? Would make the night feeds less of an issue (presuming that she's still breastfed, wouldn't help with bottles!)

FWIW I don't think nine feeds in 24 hours for a 4 month old is over the top at all.

I knew I shouldn't have posted the "elisabeth sleeps through" . she came into our bed at around 12 am. Then a few hrs later it was Ophelia's turn. She slept with me until the morning.

ARGH!!!!!!!!!

The girls, about an hour ago (they NEVER do this):

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2794/4332862913_2392873646.jpg

<3 <3

So they share a room? What age from? The boys will need to go in together at some point but not sure how that's gonna play...

Also, Howie still doesn't know what his pillow's for, and sleeps curled up in the middle of the bed with the duvet right over his head.

Well, we finally got their room sorted out in Mar '07 when Ava was just past her 2nd b'day and Lulu was five months. At that point it was a bed and a cot; since May '09 they've had identical Ikea beds (it's never looked this good since):

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3350/3552977936_02afcaac9e.jpg

Guys, I need some... support. Be frank, I don't give a shit if you say I'm crazy or stupid for saying what I'm about to post.

Every night Ophelia comes to our bed. Now this wouldn't be that big of a problem if our bed was big enough. But it isn't. So one of us needs to go sleep in her (big single bed). It has happened that Elisabeth has awakaned and cuddled up next to Ophelia in our bed. You can't really refuse when she sees O sleeping in our bed. We're at the same point as E's sleepless period (first 15 months or so). We're wrecked. I can't really say no, I just let her sleep in our bed. But my husband is, understandably, not happy. Has anyone made a firm point and refused their kid(s) in their own bed?

How long does this period - of sleeping in parents' bed- really last? It can't be that long, right?

See, this is what happens when you let them out of the closet at night.

Nath I know loads of families who play musical beds with their kids in the middle of the night. And nobody who still does it with a teenager, so they must grow out of it at some point! I'm always in favour of the solution that gets everyone the most sleep, so if you all sleep OK in together then why not -- is getting a bigger bed an option?

OTOH if it's stopping you sleeping then why not try some gentle ways to fix it. Some friends of mine had success getting their three-year-old to stay in his own bed with a night/day alarm clock like this one -- http://www.bunnyclock.com/. Or how about a reward chart?

Nath, we haven't cracked this problem at all.

Ava comes in with us less than she used to - perhaps seven nights out of every ten rather 19 out of every 20 (as it was up to a year ago) - and if it's just her then there's virtually no sleep disruption. But if it's Tallulah too (perhaps one night in four), then there's no way we can get through the night. Either I have to try and sleep in about four inches of bed, or they fight for space keeping us all awake, or - if I'm lucky - Lulu is so heavily under at the point at which her presence wakes me that I can carry her back into her room without further disturbance. I have gone and slept in Ava's bed before but it's the least-favoured option as it leaves Lulu on the edge of our bed and me out of earshot of the alarm.

Okay, knock on wood, suddenly she has been sleeping through the night much more. Of course discounting that one night when both woke up and slept in our bed. But I was able to get them back into their own bed.

TH, lolz. :-)

Friend updates F'book status at 8:30, says he is Ferberizing (cry it out) one of his sons. Through the comments, he and his wife make it known that the Ferberizing son used to go to sleep at 8:00, but lately it has been more like...9:00. A later comment from the dad, left close to 9:00, says "Oh, there he goes again." They are not losing sleep over their son -- who might not need as much sleep as he once did, you know? -- and they are getting tough over one bloody hour. I doubt their older son slept through it.

My nerves wouldn't make it, I promise you. Co-sleeping is the only way I will survive.

Beeps stopped co-sleeping with us when she got a newly decorated room w/ twin bed that has a princess canopy. I totally miss it.

I loved co-sleeping with Howie. There is nothing like waking up with a baby snuggled alongside you. But Archie never really went for it, he slept much better in his own room. Plus being able to breastfeed lying down is the key to restful co-sleeping and even now Archie won't latch on lying down.

Same here. Ophelia never went for co-sleeping. Elisabeth still is a very fussy sleeper. But y'know you have to adapt. Be flexible. I do realize I was (and still am) very quick to run if she cries. The other day I went to the attic after I put her to bed for her afternoon nap. She cried. I decided to just go up for a minute. She stopped after two minutes. lol

I'm not a big fan of co-sleeping as I tend to roll over. I know many say that a mom will wake up if she rolls on top of her child, but I woke up once or twice with her lower body under mine. I worry way too much. But she's older now and I see less danger in doing it. :-) But I did co-sleep (when necessary, when she wanted).