(no subject)

[rivka]

At 3:30am, I crept up the attic stairs, heart pounding, to see whether Alex was dead.

She wasn't. She was merely sleeping through the night.

Technically, "sleeping through the night" is defined as five hours of consecutive sleep. Alex has done that tons of times - every night, even, if you don't count the occasional brief awakening when she needs to be patted and have her pacifier popped back in. But the five-hour stretch usually occurs between 7pm and midnight. Then, typically, she'll want to eat around 12 or 1, and she might be up briefly another time or two between then and morning.

Last night, I put her to bed at 7:15pm. She eventually woke at 5am. In between, there were three occasions when she cried for 10-15 seconds and then resettled herself without help. Ten hours of sleep! She wasn't even especially hungry at 5 - just awake. Michael took her downstairs and they played for an hour, and then she sucked down a bottle and crashed for a 45-minute nap.

Ten hours of consecutive sleep! Please, please let her make a habit of it.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

"Ten hours of consecutive sleep! Please, please let her make a habit of it."

She will. But by that time you'll wish she would wake up and get dressed for school.

B

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, I remember how welcome this transition was. I hope she continues to sleep all through the night.

[minnaleigh.livejournal.com]

Wow! Sorry about the moments of terror because I was there with my niece once when I was babysitting for the weekend but yay for sleeping through the night!

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is *very* good news.

-J

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

"She was merely sleeping through the night."

Hee! I think we've all done that.

May this be the beginning of a trend.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

*grin* Be careful what you wish for. Next thing you know, you'll be having to pry her out of bed to get ready for school.

[going-not-gone.livejournal.com]

She'll probably do this intermittently for a while, before it becomes a regular habit. But yes, you are on your way to a somewhat less sleep-deprived stage of parenting. And it's a beautiful thing.

[ladyvonkulp.livejournal.com]

Isn't that awesome! Kate was a co-sleeper with us, waking at every movement, about every 2-3 hours. She was about seven months when I decided to try her on her own, big brother was at Grandma's, daddy was out of town. The first night I put her down at 10, she woke up at 4:30 to be nursed back down. The second night, she slept from 10pm to 10:30am.

Since then, she has never woken US up between midnight and 8am. Between 8pm and midnight, plenty of times. Especially now, since she's teething, but she likes her long stretches of sleep, too. Congrats to everyone in the house, and enjoy the sleep!

[rivka.livejournal.com]

We have been back and forth with the co-sleeping. For a while, I was sleeping in Alex's room and taking her into bed with me at whichever point in the night that it seemed like too much work to keep trying to get her to sleep in the crib.

Over Christmas, we co-slept with her every night, largely because my parents' house is so damned cold. We'd start her off in her own bed and then move her in with us the first time she woke up after we went to bed. She immediately went down from two bottles to one, and seemed to sleep much better; when we returned home, she started really objecting to being put back in the crib after she had been up at night.

So we decided to try the same arrangement at home, while we worked on figuring out how we wanted to deal with her sleep long-term. This was the third night of moving her down to our bed, except that she never really wound up in our bed last night. So, yay!

I have no illusions that it will keep, of course. I've been burned before.

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

I just did this very same thing night before last.

Congrats! May it happen more and more often for you.

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

Yay for sleepy baby!!

And yay for more sleep for the parents :-)

[geekymary.livejournal.com]

Yay, Alex! I hope she keeps it up! (and I totally understand the checking to make sure they're all right thing)

(Eddie's still having troubles with it - but he got off to a bad start with us waking him up every 6 hours for meds for the first 6 months of his life...)

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

yay!

to solve the getting out of bed for school thing, at least for a few years, i recommend you do what my parents did-- "if you don't get out of bed now, you don't get to go to school today!" we popped out of bed like little prairie dogs, i tell ya.

[ailbhe]

Can she please come and tell Linnea how it's done? PLEASE? PLEEEEEEEEASE?

A.
Who will blog sleeping patterns again soon, I think.

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

Mine's never figured it out either. I read all these people's stories... we nightweaned, 2 nights later he was sleeping 12 hour in a row, OR we stopped cosleeping, he slept straight through... etc. No magic buttons like that for us. I have decided that Liam is just not a good sleeper. But neither am I, so I suppose he comes by it honestly.

(To be fair, things are much better. He's usually asleep by 8, and usually only wakes up a couple of times, and sometimes only one of those needs attention. But then he's up and raring to go between 5 and 6.)

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

On those rare occasions when Evan sleeps through the night, I always wake up at least a couple of times to make sure he's still breathing, too. It makes me wonder why I want him to sleep through the night, if I'm going to be up all the time anyway.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Heh. I know the feeling. If she does wind up sleeping successfully in her crib all night, every night, I think I'll miss the early morning co-sleeping a little.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Your reaction to the first real "sleep through the night" was exactly the same as mine. "OMG, what if she's dead?"

I hope Alex does make a habit of sleeping ten hours, and that it lasts longer than Weegirl's did -- she slept through for two months, then started teething and waking from the pain. :/ (I wouldn't have minded so much except the teething/waking started when she was 4 months old and she didn't get a tooth for almost another _year_.)

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

Good luck with her making a habit of it...

I do know a bit about the panic; I had a kitten that was sleeping under a chest of drawers that was completely still with no apparent breathing. Don't ask me why I forgot how still cats can be, nor what I would do if the kitten wasn't breathing; I just jumped to my feet (I was looking under the chest of drawers, obviously), grabbed and lifted it away, only to see a very startled kitten looking up at me, wondering where the nice, safe hiding place went. Yes, I felt ridiculous that I then carefully put the chest of drawers back on top of her.

[xopher-vh.livejournal.com]

My friend Laura says that her older son was sleeping through the night at a very early age. With her younger one...she's still waiting. He's now 11.

Fortunately, he learned early on that when he wakes up at 3:00, his best bet is to go play videogames until he feels sleepy again, then go back to bed.

I think he's adapted for a smaller planet than we currently live on.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

Huzzah!

[beckyzoole.livejournal.com]

The first time my daughter maiabee8 slept through the night, I kept waking up every hour to check on her and make sure she was still breathing. I finally work her at about 4:00 am -- I just couldn't take it any longer! (laughs at self)