The Sleep Diaries; or, Day 345 of My Captivity

[July] We were elated.  Allison Clare was sleeping through the night, and life was good . . . for a month or two.

[August] Then she started going to bed earlier and earlier (eventually settling in at 6:30), and as her night got longer, she started waking up once.  But, we told ourselves, we couldn't expect her to sleep for 13 hours and not eat, right?  So getting up once didn't seem like a bad price to pay.

[September] Then when she started solid foods, her night feeding moved earlier and earlier . . .

And then there were two.  She'd wake up at 11:30, and then wake up at 4:00 or 5:00.  This, I figured, was simply my lot.  The pediatric nurse said to feed her more during the daytime, but it only worked for a few nights, in spite of my great hopes (and I suspect it was only a coincidence).

We hovered there at two feedings for a while.  I tried sleep-training her once or twice, but it quickly became pretty apparent that her sleep skills weren't the problem: she was just hungry.  If I didn't feed her, she'd keep putting herself back to sleep pretty well, but then waking up every 10 or 20 minutes again and crying, until she was just crying continually.  If I fed her, she'd take a full feeding and go back to sleep for hours.  Since she was kind of slim at that point (10th percentile), the pediatrician advised us to keep letting her nurse at night.

[January]  But then, a few weeks ago, she started waking up a third time. And now, unlike before, I was fairly certain she wasn't very hungry at one or two of the feedings.

So, I figured it was time for some tough love.  I picked the new feeding to eliminate first.  The first night, she woke up and was furious when I didn't feed her--crying her angry cry for a while in her crib, but she eventually went back to sleep.  The second night, she woke up again and got angry again when I came in to soothe but not feed, but she went right back to sleep when I laid her (red-faced and screaming) in her crib at that feeding time.

The third night, she went to bed at her usual time (6:45), slept though two of her usual feedings, woke up just once in the early morning to feed, and went back to sleep for a few more hours until 7:15.

Thus, here we are . . . tentatively elated again?  To be honest, I really feel like her size and metabolism have finally developed to a point that she can go long enough without eating to use the sleep skills she seems to have.  I can't blame Sam for this one--when I was telling my mom about how AC still wakes up at night, she mentioned that I didn't sleep through the night until I was a year old.  If I had known this when Allison Clare was a newborn, it probably would have devastated me, but as we are (unbelievably) nearing her one-year mark, it was a ray of hope.