Sleep Time

Leroy has always been a good sleeper and has been sleeping through the night for a couple months now. So, a friend of mine asked what the heck did I do to get this? Well, I know at least part (probably most) of it is that Leroy likes sleep. When we first brought him home from the hospital, it seemed like that was really all he wanted to do--to the detriment of his (then) scrawny little self. Leroy was 7 lbs 5 oz when he was born, and dropped down to 6 lbs 10 oz by day 4 because he just didn't even want to wake up to eat. This has definitely changed since then because now he is a whopping 21 lbs at a little over 7 months old.

So, unfortunately for those reading this and trying to get their babies to sleep, Leroy does just like to sleep, but those who know me know that I can go a little crazy and I definitely read about 8 million articles about baby sleep because as hard as being a parent is, i think it would be about 38 times harder without sleep.

So after the longest ever intro, here is what I can remember of what I did to get a good sleeper:

-Even in the beginning I read that babies need to learn the difference between night and day. During the day when Leroy would sleep we had him sleep in his bouncy chair in the living room with us, with the lights on and usually the tv/music/etc too and when I wanted to show him that it was night time, the lights came down and everything got quieter in the house. This is clearly easier to do with only one baby in the house, but I'm hoping it won't be too hard with two. After a couple months of this it was obvious that he had learned the difference between day and night and he started napping in his room that was dimmed during the day.

-at bedtime (which to be honest I can't remember how we settled on at first, I think it was just whenever he started getting sleepy around 7...also bedtime has changed a couple of times now...more on that in a bit) instead of doing a normal feeding out in the living room, Leroy got a diaper change, changed into his pjs, and got his bottle in his very quiet and mostly dark room with no eye contact (apparently when they are very young and can't do very much, even just eye contact perks them up). Then he got swaddled and put down. This was in our room for a little while, but I had to move him into his own room pretty quickly because he was a very noisy sleeper and I was constantly waking up to look at him because of a grunt, etc and most of the time he was still sleeping.

-the swaddling also helped a lot. We would swaddle him up super tight so he wouldn't whack himself in the head and wake himself up for no reason. At first we just used regular blankets, then he got too strong for those so we moved to the blankets with the Velcro on them...at some point we also wrapped an ace bandage around him on top of the swaddle, but that was definitely the most annoying to put on & take off of him when it was time for a diaper change/feeding.

-at night feedings, this should all stay the same. I got a dimmer switch for the light in the baby room and would turn it on to the minimum amount of light I could change a diaper with, then get him positioned with his bottle and turn off the light completely while he ate. For a while we couldn't figure out why Leroy would go right back to sleep (usually) when I fed him but would be up for a while when Jason would take a shift. Turns out, Jason was watching tv while leroy ate and the light/sounds woke him up to much and he just couldn't settle back down right away.

I think this is all I can remember for that first newborn stage, but I'll write some more about the later months too...