That's right! Blake slept from 11 pm until 5am. Amazing. At 4am Mom was wide awake wondering what was wrong with him, and so I started a conversation with my sleeping/droggy husband about whether I should wake him to feed him since it had been so long. (Poor Mike wasn't able to get back to sleep and so he got up and left for work by 5:45am!) I decided to let him sleep, and he finally awoke at 5am.
How did this happen, you may ask? I think it was mostly due to two missed naps during the day, and the added exhaustion of crying for about an hour and a half before bed. Not great reasons, and not reasons I want to be repeated. So we'll see if it happens again.
My pre-baby hopes of being able to perfectly apply "Baby Wise" to our little one have been met with a dose of reality, and I have moved on to other methods/philosophies. He is not a good sleeper, and misses naps frequently (if he becomes over-stimulated, in which case he might be happy but awake, or because of an upset tummy, in which case he is screaming).
I think he has recently become generally over-tired. It didn't make sense to keep waking him up (per the schedule advised in the Baby Wise book) after he finally got to sleep. So now I'm trying the recommendations of the book "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" and NOT waking a sleeping baby. It resulted in a three hour nap yesterday and another three hour nap today. I am grateful I had been waking him for the first 5 weeks or so, to get breast-feeding well established and to make sure he was gaining weight appropriately in the early weeks. But now that is not as much of a concern as his lack of sleep.
Also, I've stopped the CIO method for now. (Yah, it only lasted about 1 day!) Except for those couple of times I wrote about, he doesn't seem to calm down once he gets all upset (and then he won't sleep at all). Healthy Sleep habits advises not trying sleep training until at least week 6 (after due date), and possibly later. So for now I am often letting him fall asleep in my arms, or at least get very close to asleep before I put him down. And I "put him down" in the bouncy-seat just about every time, because for some reason he has decided not to sleep in his crib during the day... But that's another challenge for another time. First step - get the little boy to sleep. Next goal, work on the where and how of it!
