Sleeping

People always seem to be curious about how much sleep you're getting with a newborn, so I thought I'd blog about Tigger's sleep patterns.

I'm not going to lie; the first 6-8 weeks were a bear. Tigger needed to eat every 3 hours, though that wasn't the hard part. The hard part was getting him to sleep! He rarely wanted to go down in the evening and would rarely go back to sleep after those middle of the night feedings.

Now, things are much better! We put Tigger on a schedule (based on On Becoming Baby Wise: Giving Your Infant the Gift of Nighttime Sleep). Basically, you follow the same schedule every 3 hours. Tigger gets fed (30 minutes), has awake/play time (one hour), then sleeps (for 1 1/2 hours). We're not too rigid on the schedule; if we wants to sleep after just 1/2 an hour of awake time, we let him. Or if he gets up after a 45 minute nap, that's ok too. I think the biggest lesson learned from the schedule is teaching Tigger to go to sleep in his crib. We lay him down awake and he's learned to go to sleep by himself. We don't have to rock him, put a pacifier in or anything. Once he learned that, the nighttime was lots easier!

So now our schedule is to 'stuff' him (i.e. supplement with formula after breastfeeding) sometime around 9 or 10 pm. Then Tigger sleeps 5-6 hours and gets up around 3 or 4 am. He gets fed again then goes back to sleep. He's up again at 7 or 8 am and we start our day.

Now that we've made such great progress, I'm going for the gold! My goal is to eliminate the 3/4 am feeding. Last night might have been a sign of that progress - Tigger slept 8 hours! For some reason, he woke up at 11 pm and since Papa Tigger was up and I was trying to sleep, Papa Tigger gave him a few more ounces and put him back down (we ordinarily would have let him cry for a few minutes and go back to sleep). He didn't wake up until 8 am! I think we're going to do that going forward - top him off around 11 pm or midnight. The book actually suggested that, but we hadn't tried it yet.

In summary, we've been pretty lucky in that Tigger likes to sleep:) We hope it lasts!

And not that it relates to sleeping, but here's a picture of Papa Tigger with Tigger: