« March 2006 | Main

April 11, 2006

Sleep, finally.

Fiona is just about three weeks shy of her first birthday and I'm happy to report that last night was the first night she slept through completely.

Sleep has always been the sticking point with Fiona. She's otherwise a perfect baby -- calm, happy, easy to get along with and loves to travel. But she's never been good at sleeping. The first six or seven months were tough on us -- even with switching off baby wake up duties still meant we got a maximum of 3 hours of sleep between interruptions. There were loads of nighttime feedings, rockings, and sometimes hourly attempts to get her back to sleep. We instituted the nighttime rituals very early on, so that helped matters from the 8PM-midnight realm, but it wasn't until recently that we finally got the midnight-6am sleep to stick.

We've been working on it for about a month now, first by cutting back the nightly feedings and instead just giving a pacifier. Then we kept her in her crib as much as possible, so no co-sleeping or feedings in our bed. The Ferber stuff where you let her cry it out never really worked and we could never commit to ignoring her for five minutes, but she's getting pretty good at calming herself down after a few seconds. Most recently, her solid food has gone up and I think tanking her up at dinner each night has greatly helped.

There are a lot of good basic sleep tips out there but different things work with different babies. I'm just glad we finally figured it out for Fiona.

Posted by mathowie at 09:06 AM