Sleep: Part 1 of many on the topic

As you can imagine, like any new parent, Mike and I are obsessed with the topic of sleep: when, how long, and just how a baby gets his or her zzzzs. I used to think the elusive goal for parents was to get their kids to "sleep through the night," which--depending on the definition--could mean anywhere between 5 hours (the medical definition of the term, apparently) and 8 hours. I've since learned that it is also important to get them to learn to fall asleep on their own, in their own bed. Since Holden's a mere two and a half months old, this is not something we need to deal with yet, but eventually, we'll have to stop putting him down asleep, after we've already nursed him or rocked him. And the very thought of this, so soon after this little guy entered the world and gave us fits for the first 4 weeks, gives me a headache. Though we may have to eventually go to the "cry it out" method of sleep training popularized by Richard Ferber, we're trying our best to avoid this route.

So right now, we've started a bedtime routine that seems to work rather well: first a diaper and clothing change, followed by a period in which we talk about our day, and then a song, a book, nursing or bottle feeding, then bed. And yes, sigh, this almost always involves rocking him to sleep. But through this process we've also discovered something else. Holden really does like to talk about his day. Yeah, sure, he doesn't make sense at this point in the game, but for some reason after we change his clothes, he really loves to coo his heart out. And that moment is one of the best in the day for us.

But even better than that is the fact that the routine seems to work: on most nights he only wakes up once for a feeding before morning time. In other words, there have been quite a few times now that he's slept "through the night" (5 hours). We count ourselves extremely lucky in this regard--he started this general pattern on his own about a month ago, with little work on our part. If you had asked us in November if this could happen we would have laughed at the thought. In fact, the only thing I think we did to help this process along was that we introduced him to the crib within a week of him coming home (not that I'm against any other method of parenting--it's just what worked best for us).

At the moment, though, he's not going to bed until about 10:30 pm. So we're working on that. And hopefully, there will be a day that he'll want to go to sleep in his bed on his own. Stay tuned...

And naps, by the way, are another topic entirely! (Good night sleeper? Bad napper!)