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Thursday, September 20, 2007

One huge step backward, 4 big steps forward

At 5 months of age, I believe that Ellie is sleeping through the night again, like she did before going to Colorado. Whoohoo! Finally!

Here's what happened:

After returning form Colorado, for two and a half weeks she would only sleep an hour at a time. Often it would be 15 minutes at a time. You try getting sleep if you have to get up every 15 minutes to put a baby back to sleep. We once got desperate and tried to let her cry it out but that lasted 2 hours! Ugh.

Finally, she got to the point where she would sleep 3 hours at a time again. Obviously this wasn't as good as the 7-9 pre-Colorado times, but it was a significant improvement.

Last night marked the 3rd night in a row that she slept 7 hours! Woohoo! Go baby, go baby! I've even been able to get a small stock-pile of milk stored because of this!

So it has taken us a month and a half to get back to where we were pre-Colorado... but even that's not true. We're ahead of pre-Colorado because of the following MAJOR accomplishments:

1. She is no longer swaddled at night.
2. She has recently been putting herself to sleep.
3. SHE NO LONGER HATES THE CAR SEAT!!!

It's still not perfect. Supposedly a baby her age should be able to sleep 10-12 hour stretches, but at this point I'm not complaining. I think we're pretty lucky to find ourselves at this point without having to do any real sleep training. Go baby, go baby! It's your birthday!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jet Lag?????????

Niffer said...

Yes. Baby jet lag is a scary thing. When we returned to MD and put her down for bed, she would think that it was a nap and wake up bright eyed and ready to play in an hour. I'm still not sure why this would last all night other than guessing that since we kept putting her down without any awake time, she was just never tired? Or too tired? I don't know.