Not In Kansas Anymore (NIKA)

Experimenting With Baby

Yesterday Elizabeth found an interesting article on PubMed about getting babies to sleep longer at night. I should preface the following by pointing out that, while Dorothy is sleeping pretty well for a baby who is 2 or even 4 months old, she hasn't progressed much in the last couple of months. She normally goes to bed around 8pm plus or minus a half hour (ignoring weird days when we're out late), and then sleeps for roughly 4.5 hours, waking up sometime around 1am (again +/- half hour). She'll then sleep until maybe 4am, and then usually again until 6am. (Note that I'm simplifying things a bit, rather than bore you with all the variability in her sleep patterns.) We would, of course, prefer her to sleep for a longer stretch to start with, and then for a single longer stretch through the rest of the night.

So the article Elizabeth found discussed a method for getting young babies (4-8 weeks old) to sleep longer at night (basically, trying to get them up to 5 hours of sleep once per night). The method is simple enough that we figure it should probably work for older babies too.

There are two parts to the method. First, wake up the baby and feed her between 10pm and midnight. Then, when the baby wakes up in the middle of the night (presumably asking for food), you should try to distract her for a while, so as to stretch out the period until she actually eats. So rather than feed at, say, 1am, she would instead wake up at 3am, and you should try to keep her from crying (much) for as long as possible, perhaps 4am. By stretching things out this way, the baby should eventually sleep for longer stretches at a time.

All of which explains why I'm up and posting at 3:30 in the morning. :-) After eating around 10:30pm, Dorothy woke up just after 2:30am. We did the dance and rock thing in the living room for 25+ minutes, during which she was pretty calm. Then I decided to see if she'd stay calm in her bouncy chair up in my office. We've been here for at least 20 minutes; we'll see how long we can last! I just hope we don't teach Dorothy to regularly stay awake for an hour or longer in the middle of the night. :-O