Sleeping Through the Night

One of the major hurtles new parents have to face is training their child to sleep through the night. We have a lot of friends that have children so we heard all the horror stories. When we finally got pregnant that was one of the main issues that we wanted to figure out how to deal with early. We didn't want to wait till Alexa was 1 before she had a good night sleep. :) As we did our research we learned how sleeping was a time for the child's brain to grow and how important sleep was to them. We also learned how important sleep was to parents if they wanted to take care of their child as best they could. So we decided to try to train her early.
I know it may sound weird that we wanted to train a little baby who was just born to sleep but trust me we were flexible. It wasn't really about training but more about learning my daughter's cues and following them. Children love being on a schedule. I'll explain why I think so in a later post. From my experience as a teacher I know that children like to know what's going to happen next. So I wanted to give my daughter that too.
We started a formal schedule only after 6 weeks but we started informally scheduling her when she was born. We are blessed - Alexa kind of scheduled herself. We just helped her along. In the beginning every time we fed her we would play with her until we thought she seemed to be getting tired and then let her sleep. As most parents know newborns only stay awake at the most 45 minutes so it didn't take long for her to go to sleep. I slowly started figuring out her cries and made her schedule according to that. Then I started to notice her cues: rubbing her eyes, little cries, being fussy. Most of the time I would wrap her up in a swaddle me and she would fall asleep in about 5 minutes. There are the occasional times where she'll cry herself to sleep because she's been so stimulated but they are very few. To make it a little easier this is what her sleep schedule looked like.


Feed (from 10-45 minutes)

Waketime (starting from feeding time -
Newborn - 45 minutes
after 6 weeks - about 90 minutes
4 months - about 2 hours

Sleep
Newborn - about 60-90 minutes
after 6 weeks - about 90 minutes
4 months - about 2 hours

Remember these are all things I did because I thought they were best for my child. Everyone has a different approach because each child is different. This is just meant as a guide to help if you need it. I hope this did help anyone out there struggling with this. Please feel free to comment on how you helped your child to sleep at night.