More about sleep

First, I need to acknowledge that Jeff and I celebrated our ten year wedding anniversary on August 4. It is hard to believe that it has been ten years already! Maren has started easing into daycare, and she had her second day on our anniversary, so we went out to lunch (she was only there for about an hour and a half or two hours). Later that night, we opened up our "wedding predictionary," in which Jeff and I and our wedding guests all made predictions about what would transpire over the ten years following our wedding. It was fun to read what people had written, and what we had written. Some people were right on in their predictions, which was interesting, and some people just had fun with it :-) In many ways it was not what we had anticipated for our ten year anniversary, as I think that we thought we would do something more elaborate. But sitting on the couch at home looking at people's predictions for what our life would be like now, while Maren was asleep down the hall, is probably more fitting anyway. We did take our trip to Hawaii (though I don't think we would have made the trek if it was just for anniversary), but in general it might feel not quite genuine to make a big deal out of it :-)

We are still in the midst of our long journey toward better sleep for Maren. The first few nights of our sleep plan went really well – Maren was able to fall asleep fairly quickly and without tears while getting use to falling asleep without nursing. After that, things were rougher for a little while. The next step after falling asleep without nursing was to have Maren fall asleep in her crib, but with us helping in any way we could. So the first night she fell asleep pretty easily with me just rubbing her back. The next night was not so easy – she got upset, and Jeff ended up rocking her to sleep. Same thing the next night.

According to our sleep plan, if Maren was not taking well to this step, we were simply supposed to move on to the next step, which was having her fall asleep in her crib with comfort from us but without us helping her all the way to sleep. This did not go so well at all. There was lots and lots of crying, despite many attempts at comforting her. The crying was intense, and quite distressing to me. Things were supposed to be much better after three nights, but they were not. And then Jeff had to go to a conference in Philadelphia. So I continued with our sleep plan for two nights while he was away, and the first night went pretty well, but the second night not so well. And then Maren got sick and had a fever. So our sleep coaching was put on pause while we waited for her to get better.

Fortunately, she got better very quickly, and we were able to resume. We expected things to be pretty much the same as they were before the pause, but things have turned out to be completely different. At least in terms of crying. For the past two nights she has spent some time playing in her crib before going to sleep, and crying for short bursts (which are intense, but sometimes limited to just a few seconds). She does actually seem to be figuring out how to put herself to sleep. Although it is taking a while so far (almost an hour and a half last night and almost an hour tonight), it seems like we are starting to make progress.

However, I am a little worried because this sleep plan has us continuing to work on going to sleep, then adding in working on night wakings, and only after that starting to work on naps. I am worried because we will need her to be at daycare during nap time in just a few weeks. I am not sure whether we will have gotten naps working well in the crib by then. I will give more details about daycare soon, but for now keep your fingers crossed that sleep improves more quickly so that we can start having Maren try to be at daycare during naptime!