It sleeps!

13
June

She’s the one in blue, if you couldn’t find her.

My daughter, Sprout, is now 15 months old. And you know what has finally happened? She now sleeps through the night! She’s been doing it for about a month now, but I’ve finally had time to sit down and blog about it.

With Bean, our first, he embodied the saying “sleeping like a baby.” By like 6 or 8 weeks he was sleeping 10-12 hours a night (maybe with a feeding break in there?) and it was wonderful. Well, we didn’t really know any better, but as new parents any sleep is welcomed. We tried co-sleeping with him but it just didn’t work, he was too noisy. So he was in a crib from early on as well.

With Sprout… Well, Sprout was another beast altogether. Sprout didn’t like to sleep. Not even during the day. I mean, she would nap, but not like Bean did. Bean was a scheduled baby. He had a three hour cycle that he wouldn’t deviate from. An hour and a half awake, an hour and a half nap, repeat. All day. It was awesome. Sprout not so much. Now I’m sure a big part of that has to do with having a big brother and a family that didn’t completely rotate around her (like we did when it was just us and Bean), but I don’t think that would have made much of a difference, she is just wired differently.

She used to just lie there and stare at us. “It won’t stop staring at me,” became a running joke between Mama Bean and I as often, when she was supposed to be sleeping, we’d look over and there were these big eyes staring at us. It was actually pretty cute. :)

Sprout is a social little girl; she doesn’t like to be alone and didn’t like to sleep alone. Nope, our baby girl taught us all about cosleeping. And quite honestly, I enjoyed it. I loved having her next to me. She breastfed much better, so Mama Bean was able to feed her in bed with us, and it generally worked quite well. It was fun to wake up with my beautiful baby girl and beautiful wife in bed next to me.

But even in our bed, she wouldn’t sleep. we’d be ready for bed by 11 but she’d still be going strong. We’d finally get her to sleep only to have her wake us up a few hours later. A feeding was usually enough to put her back down, but she weaned at 9 or 10 months so that meant getting up and making a bottle multiple times a night.

After a year she started to sleep longer and longer, and up until a few weeks ago we were still giving her a bottle around 11 to ensure she would sleep until morning.

These days, she goes down around 8 and sleeps until 7:30-8 the next morning. It’s pretty wonderful. Some nights I still rock her to sleep, but mostly I can put her in her crib and she’ll just go to sleep. She likes it if I sit in the glider in her room while she goes to sleep. Though sometimes I can sit there for 20 min, think she’s finally asleep and get up to leave and she pops her head up as though to ask where I’m going. She’s pretty good about putting it back down and going back to sleep though, but I like the concern. :)

I know some people go years before their children sleep through the night; I didn’t expect to sleep well with either child. Bean set us up with high expectations, and while I didn’t get a full night of sleep for quite a long time, I loved that we got to co-sleep with her.