Sleep Math...

Baby sleep - Something I've found to be one of the biggest mommy mysteries! As babies grow, their ability to stay awake for longer periods of time between naps and nighttime gradually extends. The hard part is knowing WHEN and by HOW MUCH to extend their awake times to achieve the optimal results. Extend awake time too long and you've got an overtired baby on your hands, high cortisol levels, and disastrous sleep. Put baby down before they've been awake long enough, or for too many naps, and you risk really messing up their night time sleep!

Since he was born, Easton has gone through many sleep changes and struggles. Most recently, about a month ago, he started fighting bedtime and night sleep in general. He went from sleeping from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am with only 1 feed (10:00 pm... without even waking), to waking every 3 hours and the only way to get him back to sleep was nursing (he was never hungry, just wanting comfort). We tried the "Sleep Easy Solution" like we did at 4 months, but it just wasn't working this time around! I really wasn't sure if it was teething or a growth spurt or the due to the many developmental changes he's growing through right now, but nothing that worked before seemed to be working this time around!

Anyways, last week, we were out of town and got home about an hour after his normal bedtime so he didn't end up going down until after 9:00 pm. Well, he ended up sleeping through until 7:00 am without a single wake-up! I was tempted to put him down at his normal 7:00 pm bedtime the next night, but I wanted to see if putting him down a bit later would result in another amazing night, so I put him to sleep at 8:00. Sure enough, another full night's sleep! We were on to something! For the past week, he's been going down at 8:00 pm and waking at 7:00 am beautifully. Looks like 11 hours of night sleep is our magic number!

In terms of naps, he's currently transitioning from 3 naps to 2 naps, but we've yet to find the perfect timing for those naps. If his 2 naps are too early in the day, we've got a 5 hour stretch before bedtime and he just can't handle that! But if we takes a cat nap around suppertime, he'll end up staying up way too late!  If we stretch his awake time too much, he's a grump and ends up taking short naps. We still have to find that 'sweet spot' like we did with night time sleep. Hopefully we'll figure that out soon and have a perfect all-around sleeper! Here's hoping.

Anyways, just wanted to do this quick sleep update so I can refer back with baby #2 someday! I'll leave you with some 7 month shots of E which I forgot to post last time! I'll be posting again in 2 weeks when he turns 8 months :)