Monday, February 1, 2010

Sleep

So we finally bit the bullet and did the whole CIO a couple of months ago.  Things were going great.  All 3 kids slept through the night, which meant that I slept through the night.  Life was grand.  I had the kids in a routine that worked for our family.  I started getting at least a little bit better at keeping the house clean and somewhat organized (no where near where I should have been but better than I had been).  Well, as my luck would have it, we are back to getting up in the middle of the night.  I am starting the whole CIO thing again, but it is so hard to have to go through it again.  I am assuming that this is a natural regression and that I just have to suck it up and deal.  Nap times used to be the best sleep that the kids got, now that is even tough.  I need to preface this next sentence with the fact that I thought I had about an hour before the kids would go down for their afternoon nap.  Today, we went for a little bit of a drive and Eva Rose fell asleep almost immediately.  Now what?  Do I continue driving or do I go home and attempt to put her to sleep in the crib as well as Thomas (who also fell asleep) and Michael. I finally decided that I would go home and put them all in their cribs.  Well that totally backfired and here I am almost an hour later listening to them all awake.  It's pretty much time to get them up and say screw it to the second nap for today (at least that is what Weissbluth says, I believe: attempt a nap for 1 hour then get them up and try again tomorrow).  Maybe we're off for the drive now and they'll still fall asleep and this time we will just keep driving.

Any thoughts on the sleep regression?  Our schedule has pretty much remained the same.  No real deviations.  The twins just turned 1 and Michael is almost 2.

4 comments:

  1. How long are they crying for at night? Collette sometimes cries in teh middle of the night but we can see in the monitor that she is still asleep. Usually it never lasts longer than 30 minutes and is off-and-on.

    As for naps, I try not to go out close to nap time, at least not a car ride longer than 15 minutes, to avoid just that issue. If my kids sleep 20 minutes or more in the car, its really hard to get them back to sleep in their cribs.

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  2. Nicole- I usually let them cry at least 45 minutes before I go and get them. Going in the car was probably a stupid decision and I should have known better.

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  3. Hmmm... that's though. We've been lucky and haven't had much trouble with sleep since we did CIO at 4.5 months for naps and then at 9 months for nighttime sleep. I'm sure it's tough to start CIO all over again, but hopefully it won't take as long to become effective the second time.

    Is 2 naps a day still working for all 3 kids? Who is waking up in the night?

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  4. When my twins were 1 and my older daughter was 2, everyone went to one 3 hour nap a day. It was about a month long transition, but well worth it.

    We didn't do the CIO and all my kids sleep great at 3,3, & 4. I have found in our house, that they typically have sleep changes with almost every big milesone. It's short lived and we just stick to our routine and it passes and everyone goes back to getting a good nights sleep in a couple of weeks or less.

    When they got to about 2-1/2 they start sleeping way more predictably every night, all night, no matter what is going on.

    Hang in there ... I know it's hard now ... but it really does get so much easier ... and a lot of fun.

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