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Parenting after a Loss
ibis
member
6 pm bedtime + 16 hrs a day sleep?
ibis
member
I listen to a podcast called New Moms New Babies and I heard one today where they talk to the author of the 3 Day Sleep Solution. I disagreed with her about several things, including her stance on "sleep crutches" and her CIO advice (one hour of crying? no thanks)... buuuut.... I was intrigued that she said babies should go to bed 12 hrs after their natural wake time, which for most babies is around 5-6pm. In her opinion, if your baby doesn't STTN after 4 months of age he is going to bed too late. Also, at my baby's age of almost 8 mo he should still be sleeping 16 hrs a day - until he's at least a year old!
I don't want to try her sleep training, but the earlier bedtime is definitely worth a try. We recently moved DS's bedtime from 8 pm to 7 pm. The result was that he went from waking 5-6 times a night to waking twice a night! I'm going to try to nudge it back to 6 pm and see what happens!
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Re: 6 pm bedtime + 16 hrs a day sleep?
Ahh, it's hard to answer those questions because he's been all over the place lately - for the past month or a little more. I thought because of teething...
Typical: wake up 6:30. Nap around 9:30, at home he takes long morning naps of an hour or two, but at daycare (2 days/week) it's often a short nap of 30-45 min because he gets woken up.
Then he would normally nap again around 1:30 home or daycare. Shorter nap of 45-60 min if he's home, longer of an hour or more at daycare.
And then he used to take one more short 30 min nap around 4:30 at home. But lately he's been dropping that.
He'd been going to bed at 8 for a while but he started waking up more and more until he was up almost every hour all night long... insanity. He would go right back to sleep if I nursed him usually, but the night wakings were getting worse and I was exhausted. I stopped nursing him every time and instead would just soothe, shh, pat his back, etc., only nursing if it had been at least 3 hrs. Doing that he'd fall back to sleep usually in 10-20 min.
DS gets about 15-16 hours as well. He goes to sleep about 8, wakes about 7ish (10-11 hours), takes a long morning nap about an hour and a half after he wakes up (average of 2 hours), and then goes down for a nap again about every 2 hours (they range in length from 45 minutes to 2 hours). Sometimes I even have to put him down for a short nap at like 5:30 b/c otherwise he will be too tired to hold off till 8. He has to hold off till then b/c I cluster feed him at night, and if he goes to bed any earlier than that and doesn't get 3 feedings, he'll wake up in the middle of the night to eat.
He's been STTN since 7 weeks and the times we've experimented with moving his bedtime to earlier have backfired (cause he doesn't get enough to eat).
DD get 15-17 hours of sleep a day still. AND, I don't see her cutting back any time soon. She still needs two naps and who I am to tell her "no" with another one on the way!
The super early bedtime didn't work for us (she goes to bed around 8), but making sure she was super well rested did. If I let her get over tired in the day, I know night time will be bad.
DS loves super early bedtime. I figure it's not worth the trouble to keep him up when he's clearly tired. He's already asleep for the night (fell asleep around 6:20) and will usually STTN until about 6 am.
DS also takes 3-4 naps / day, anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 hours. His daycare teachers can't believe how much he sleeps, but it makes him a happier baby!
We used to put Miles down earlier but then it seemed like he was naturally moving toward 8... guess we were wrong. I shot for 6:30 tonight but he was out by 7 pm. Last night he was out by 7:30 and only woke up at 11:45 and 4:45, which was a HUGE improvement over recent nights.
He's the type to fight sleep and his sleepy cues are often subtle. I think we were letting him get over-tired and catch his second winds... he was probably only getting 12-14 hrs sleep on a regular basis. I feel bad but... I just didn't know what I was doing wrong.
I think I might need to try that. I was trying to push DS's bedtime to later thinking it might help, but tonight we waited until 7:30 to start his routine and he was a mess. I think we'll try 7 tomorrow and see if that's better then see if we need to try even earlier.
This makes me wonder how DH's cousin set her son up to have an 11pm bedtime (so they're free to go out and about in the evenings). DS would not be able to handle that.
I'm glad he went down! As for the sleepy signs, I know that the less overtired DS is, the more obvious his sleepy signs are. When he gets off "schedule", he's a mess, but at least we know how to get him back on nowadays. We just have to make sure we put him down after being awake no more than 90 minutes, sometimes closer to 60. It's hard to explain this to babysitters, but it works!