Ada and Sleep
Bug = 3 years 4 months
Bub = 1 year 6 months What was Linus up to at this age?
Bud = 28 weeks 6 days gestation
It’s time for another update on Ada’s sleeping patterns, since it’s one of the obsessions of baby-parents and a change is on the horizon.
Timing of Naps
Ada naps just once a day now, starting any time between 11:30am and 3:00pm, depending on her tiredness and our plans for the day. She usually sleeps for about 1 1/4 hours.
Ada has had occasional nap-less days lately, but she seems to cope with this quite well. I don’t take it as a sign that she’s ready to stop napping yet – on other days she’s ready well before lunch!
Going to Sleep
For as long as Ada’s has been sharing a room with Linus, she has been very easy to settle in her cot at bedtimes. Often she’ll sing and play with toys for a while (occasionally over an hour!), but mostly she goes to sleep fairly quickly.
She’s been a little harder to settle for the past month, but still ridiculously easy really… every few evenings we find we just have to go in, tell her to lie down, pick up her thrown toys from the floor, and tuck her in once or twice after bedtime.
Overnight
Ada very rarely needs any attention in the middle of the night. On the rare occasion that she wakes up and doesn’t immediately settle herself, simply going in (ok, let’s be honest – Bob going in!) and tucking her into her cot again is enough to get her back to sleep.
Both of our children are sleeping extraordinarily well lately… so much so that I had to resort to setting an alarm to wake me (for catching a bus to work) last week. We’ve had many mornings lately where we haven’t had to get out of bed until after 8:00am, which I think is pretty lucky for parents of a 1-year-old and 3-year-old.
But I’m not feeling guilty about this… I know that in a couple of months Bud will see to it that this period is remembered as just a crazy dream!
Change in Sleeping Arrangements
Since last week, we’ve started working on getting Ada to have naps in a big kid bed (currently Linus’s) instead of in her cot – we need to get the cot available for when Bud arrives.
On Thursday and Saturday I tried napping her in the bed. I resolved to sit in the room with her (ignoring her) for a while. She was happy to use the bed instead of the cot, and looked quite comfortable. Unfortunately on both these occasions, she managed to dirty her nappy within 30 minutes of starting nap-time, so both attempts were cut short and she was put in her cot (there’s only so long I can/am happy to leave zombie-Linus in front of a video!).
On Sunday, we cheated. Ada fell asleep in the car on the way home, and we successfully transferred her from the car to the bed without waking her. She then had her first nap in the bed, and Linus and I had the pleasure of her very first, extremely cute “wake-up-and-wander-through”.
Last night Bob put Ada to bed in Linus’s bed*. After a few wander-throughs (including one accompanied by her brother – very cute!!), Bob decided that it was time to put her back in her cot, and a similar thing just happened for today’s nap. After three warnings, I put Ada in her cot, making her sob and cry out “Bed! Bed!”. I explained the deal; she understood, and has promised to stay in bed next time (although I’m possibly over-analysing her blinks and “Okays”), and she happily lay down in her cot.
It’s now over an hour later and she’s still playing, but she’s not crying and I’m blogging, so that’s a win overall.
* This is do-able because Linus is put down in our bed at bed-time, then transferred later in the evening.
