Last night was our second night with no co-sleeping. Once Davis had slept on his own in the crib for three hours, we decided he was developed enough to leave our bed. I was becoming concerned that he was building an unhealthy connection between food and sleep that we hoped would be easier to fix now than a month from now (when we had planned to move him to his crib). I read a book that would have me believe he should be capable of sleeping 12 hours with no food and be able to fall asleep all by himself. I decided that's crap for a 7 week old, but we are using some ideas from that book. The key being the appearance of a 'core night'. This is when a baby sleeps a huge block for the first time. Around week two, Davis slept for 5 hours one night. The idea of the core night is that he's shown he can sleep for five hours without needing food and you try and build on those five hours, first requiring he goes without food for that time and then extending them in opposing directions to spread out his sleep cycle. So two nights ago when Davis woke up two hours after going to sleep, John soothed him back to sleep (well, mostly the swing soothed him back to sleep) and he made it another couple of hours and he woke up hungry (that's also the thing we had to learn, just because he woke up doesn't mean he needs to be fed..we need to take his cues into account). So two nights ago he woke up three times and since we didn't feed him at midnight, last night he slept right on through midnight to his normal 2am feeding! That's the other idea of this book and many other sleep books, that rewarding behavior (play, food, cuddles, etc.) will become a learned wakeup time for them even if they don't need those things.
I hoped that last night we might be down to one feeding between 10pm and 6am, but he woke up again at 3:30 am, when he had only gone to sleep an hour before. I'm convinced it coincides with the automatic cat dispenser going off and the cats (ok, Lilly) racing through the house to get to the food within milliseconds of it being dispensed. (You can see we already have members of this family with an unhealthy connection to food :) So tonight we're going to change the timer on the dispenser to see if it changes Davis' second wake up time. John asked me if that could really be waking him up...and I had to remind him of his conversation with our downstairs neighbor. John asked her if the baby was waking her up and she said "No..but the cats do". Yes. We have those kind of cats. Luckily, we love them and can look past that, but I'm afraid our downstairs neighbor isn't too happy about them. However, I remember one day when Davis was about three weeks old and I had just gotten to fall asleep for a nap finally when the cats went racing through the dining room and woke him up. They almost went to visit the sausage factory that day.
We're very hopeful that we are helping Davis learn good sleep behaviors!
Above is a picture of John reading a Dr. Seuss Alphabet book to Davis. Davis loves being read to! Unfortunately, Dr. Seuss has John making up rhymes that he likes to say in the middle of the night (something about dapper diaper daddy to the rescue). Davis had a great night last night. He semi-woke up once around midnight for food and then slept until 3am. He decided he wasn't sleepy however between 3am and 5:30, so I'm exhausted today! We did try putting him to sleep in the crib and that worked for a full 45 minutes at the beginning of the night. Hopefully, if we just keep trying it he will sleep longer and longer on his own in the crib. Other good news is Courtney pointed out the swing we borrowed from them has two positions for the seat recline, so now that he can fully recline we might try the swing at 3am if he wakes up and won't go back to sleep with nursing (the 3am wakeup is a habit). We've never left him asleep in the swing without supervision before because his head will fall forward and so one of us will adjust his head and prop him up with receiving blankets everytime it happens..now there's no fear of that happening!
