Bedtime Stories

I'm sure most new parents talk about sleep a lot. Our house is no different. Here are some of our bedtime stories.

***I asked Micah's doctor if he should be on a sleeping schedule. The doctor said that some babies thrive with schedules, while others are better without them, and the best way to determine what Micah needed was to follow his cues. At the time he was doing great sleeping whenever he got tired. But then we went through a cranky period where he was over-tired and fighting sleep. So we tried putting him down at specific times throughout the day.

That didn't work well because Micah is a sporadic sleeper- meaning his naps are never the same in length. His naps vary from 15 minutes to 2.5 hours (I was thrilled when he slept this long last week!). Obviously, with a pattern like this, setting strict sleeping times wouldn't make sense. If his afternoon nap was scheduled to begin at 3, but he took an extremely long nap and slept until 2:30, that wouldn't work.

So, we've come to a happy medium (which Terry says pretty-well describes us...middle of the road on all baby issues, stricter on some, and liberal with others- a happy medium!). Now Micah stays awake for only an hour after he wakes up first thing in the morning and throughout the day we follow a 2-hours-up-and-then-nap schedule. Micah seems to be doing well this way.


***For a long time now we've been putting Micah down in his crib in his room when he falls asleep at bed time (which is around 8 or 8:30). Once we go to bed, we'll move him into the pack 'n play in our room for the night. As far as naps go, since he was born we've alternated sleeping in his crib and his pack 'n play. But somewhere along the line we started putting him down in our room more often than in his room. And it recently became apparant to me that he napped better in our room. We kind of took a step backwards in doing this. The older Micah gets the less adaptable he'll be and the harder it will be to get him to accept new sleeping arrangements. So, if we continue to let him sleep in our room, when it comes time to move the pack 'n play out of our room, and move Micah into his bed, we'll have a rough time getting him adjusted. So, for now, we're trying to transistion him to all naps in his bed, and only night time in our room.

***Monday night, it was time for Terry and I to go to bed, which means bringing Micah in from his room into ours. But we decided to try and let him sleep all night in his crib. At first it was easy. We flipped back and forth between Dave and Jay's monologues, then had our nightly highs and lows and prayer time. Then I rolled over to go to sleep and peeked into the pack 'n play like normal, although this time it was empty.

"Terry, I can't remember if I pulled the side of the crib up. Can you go check?"

Later... "Terry, did you lock the front door?"

"Yes."

"Are you sure? Because Micah is all the way on the other side of the house and if someone comes in, they get to him first."

Silence.

"Well, when you put it that way...let me go check."

Later Terry says, "So, I had this scary dream last night that this mean guy came to the door and..."

"Go get Micah."

And so it appears we (or is it me?) aren't quite ready yet to let Micah sleep alone.