If you just look at this darling face you will see that there is nothing but pure happiness from this baby. She's sweet and content and allows her brother to pummle her at less than a moments notice. But she has a bad habit. A habit that she didn't necessarily create on her own, but by simple chain of events. Her story was conceise like her brother's, she was sleeping through the night (7+ hours at night) by the time she was 7 weeks old. She didn't find to be as consistant as Finnegan as I had trouble keeping her daily schedules balanced. But she was doing it. By the time she was about 4 months old she was sleeping 10+ hours at night with a fairly consistent daily schedule... Then the excitement started. We took our first trip cross country to visit our new home with baby intow and returned to an inconsistant schedule for our sweet angel. And so the inconsistant sleeping patterns began. She was still happy for the most part, but just so sleepy. Just as everything started to level out, we moved to our new town and lived in a hotel for about 10 days. With the whole family sleeping in the same room we had late bedtimes and no naps. And when these three planet collide, you create some super bad habits (for scheduled babies -- Please don't misinterpret my wording as condemning other parenting styles... But for us, the things we were doing to pacify our sweet pea wasn't producing results that we could live with in the long term). After several weeks (nearly several months) 0f pacifing our sweet darling, I was waking up several times in the night to feed her, as I would a newborn baby and she was 9 months old! Not only this, but she'd show us at a tender young age that she could sleep longer than 5 hours before needing milk. So it was tiime to break some habits...
I'd originally wanted to start on the weekend, but that would mean that I'd be getting up each night of the week plus the nights on the weekend (when these are the nights that my hubby gets up for us). So, I decided to start on Monday night. I expected my princess to wake sometime between 5 and 6am for her feeding. But she woke up at 1:30am to my surprise. Without supplement and only reassurance, she fussed, and cried for over 90 minutes. UGH! Bad habits are hard to break. But the second night, we had much more success. She awoke at her usual 5:30am and fussed for 4 minutes, and then another 3 minutes before she fell asleep on her own. Praise the Lord. And the best part?? She wakes up happy. She doesn't wake up crying and angry in the morning, because she's had a full night sleep and is ready to start her day. We'll see what the rest of the week holds for our sweet baby!! But hopefully we're breaking bad!!
**Update**
Night 3 my darling didn't require reassurance at all. She woke up around 11pm, but she's been teething, and this is what caused the wake up. But she put herself back to sleep and slept the whole night through. So proud of her!!
No comments:
Post a Comment