Sleeping Equation

Swaddle + Soothing Sound + Sucking = SLEEP

Lukas is turning out to be a great sleeper.  We had a few days of short naps where he was waking up about 45 minutes into it and we thought we were doomed in the sleep department.  Some naps we can get him back down to sleep and others he wants nothing to do with sleeping (eating is all that is on his mind).  We discovered that he was having a growth spurt earlier this week, eating every two hours (exhausting!).  That seems to be over and he has settled back into his 2 1/2 to 3 hour intervals during the day.

After eating he has a little bit of wake time and then like clockwork he starts to whimper a little bit, signaling to us he wants to go to bed.  We swaddle him, give him his pacifier and turn on his white noise machine.  Works like a charm.  Occasionally the pacifier falls out and we need to go in to give it back to him, but sometimes he has been able to fall asleep without it.   When he is a bit more worked up and fighting going to sleep, we pull out the big guns - the hairdryer.  The higher pitch of the hairdryer works almost instantly to calm him down.

For those of you who know, we are doing the Baby Wise sleep/eating schedule which helps get into more predictable sleep cycles and helps with sleeping through the night early.  It worked with Charlie and it is working with Lukas as well.  For the first four weeks you have to wake the baby up at night, not letting him go more than five hours before you need to feed again.  When I tell people we are doing that they think we're crazy!  But finally, at five weeks we were able to let him sleep longer.  And he settled right into the routine.  We have now had four days in a row of sleeping through the night, even in the middle of his growth spurt.  I hope this keeps up; I have a lot of sleep to catch up on.