Not In Kansas Anymore (NIKA)

Sleep Details

We've been tracking Dorothy's eating and sleeping patterns for the last few weeks, sort of like the Trixie Tracker (thanks to Ben MacNeill of The Trixie Update for the inspiration). We think that it's about time she started sleeping a bit more at night, so we wanted to see if we could learn anything from her sleep patterns.

The chart below show her eating and sleeping for over two weeks (note that there are major gaps up through 7/27, and around 7/31). The horizontal axis is time of day, and the vertical axis is the date. The horizontal red bars are when she was asleep (I haven't mucked around with things enough to get them to wrap around to the next day, which is why they extend past midnight on one day, but nothing appears in the 12-2am time for most days). The vertical bars indicate when she ate, and their height is proportional to how much she ate (generally 2-5 ounces per feeding). Blue is for bottle-fed (expressed breast milk) times, and black is for breastfed times (and the amounts are less certain).

She's been averaging almost 30 ounces of breast milk and around 12 hours of sleep per day. One of the sleep books we have suggests that babies her age average 14-15 hours of sleep per day, but she seems to be happy with 12. We'd like it if she got more, but we can't force it on her.

We're still trying different tactics to get Dorothy to sleep longer. Although she will usually wake up about 5 or so hours after her first night-time sleep, she's not necessarily hungry. We've been able to get her to go back to sleep and go for a total of 7+ hours between feedings. But we did learn to NOT wake her up between 10pm and midnight in order to feed her more under the theory that such a tactic would get her to sleep through the night. She would instead wake up around 2:30am and be very awake for at least an hour. :-( Hopefully we'll get to a better sleep schedule by the time she's six months old...