Breaking the sleeping schedule breaks eardrums
I’d read this before, but a baby that doesn’t get enough naps or go to bed on time can’t sleep properly the rest of the time. If you don’t give baby enough sleep, baby won’t sleep. I’d considered that to be one of the stranger factoids about infants that I had not properly encountered until recently.
On entering daycare, Maggie was having trouble sleeping at night. I thought that it might be performance anxiety since her daycare wages are performance based, but it seems that she was having trouble taking naps at daycare and this lack of sleep meant the nights were sleepless as well.
Yesterday there was a plan to keep her up a little later so she
could see a free concert. At ten minutes to her normal bedtime the meltdown started happening, but we had to wait to get out of the event because we were sandwiched in there/had made the mistake of bringing a stroller that I had to carry over a couple of hundred people to egress.
So for the band’s last song they were accompanied by a wailing baby, who was louder by far than the amplified band at that point. The baby vocalized the lamentations of her people, and we exited. We got her in bed about an hour later than usual, and she was down hard.
Unfortunately she was back up at 2am-4am. This 40 minute delay in getting her to bed meant I had a nice two hour middle of the night rocking session along with an attempt at co-sleeping with a baby who learned to sleep from the Tasmanian Devil. It didn’t work.
This is bringing the question up of how does one slightly modify a sleep routine when you’ve got to be out for an hour or two after bed. It’s not fair to the baby who doesn’t understand, and it’s absolutely not fun to spend that hour just fighting a child who wants to run, plop down and sleep, and be anywhere but where they’re at.
So that’s my goal right now – see if there’s any way to modify the sleeping a bit in such a way that doesn’t harm the goal (her sleeping properly through the night,) while allowing us some flexibility to be able to do something other than come home, feed the baby, bathe the baby, put the baby to bed.
We’d actually like to play with this rugrat on more than the weekends and involve her in things that last as late as *gasp* eight p.m. *gasp*
