Figuring Out Sleeping

So you've just arrived home from the hospital with your baby. You still can't believe they let you out of the hospital with this kid, because you have no idea what the heck you're doing. You're excited and exhausted. Evening rolls around and you are ready for bed but your new baby isn't. They don't know what night time is let alone that night time equals sleeping time.  Great.

First order of business: train your baby that at night, we sleep. They don't know night from day in the hospital because it is consistently the same brightness with the hospital lights being on 24 hours a day. So how do you teach them when we sleep?

In the evenings we kept our lights down low, we have dimmer switches on most of our lights, this helped our daughter to start understanding that this low light = sleep time. We never had her in the family room with the TV on while we gave her her last bottle before bed. The noise and the lights seemed to stimulate her and not teach her this is sleepy time. (The pediatrician had to tell us to do this because when we went in for our 2 week check up, we weren't sleeping and must have looked exhausted!)  Eventually we formed a bedtime routine for her, so she knew that when we stared this it = sleepy time, for example, in the beginning we put on her pajamas and just turned on a music box while giving her her last bottle and then bounced her to sleep on a yoga ball. Now we turn on a sound machine, put on her pajamas, read her a story, feed her and then bounce her to sleep on the yoga ball. Sometimes we give her a bath before doing all of this too. This seemed to help her settle down for the evening. But it took us a long time to get this routine figured out. We kept keeping our daughter up until we went to bed. This included lots of screaming time in the evening that we termed "The Witching Hours" - my parents called it "Arsenic Hour," which usually fell around dusk, 4-7pm.  Finally my husband suggested putting her to bed before The Witching Hour so we didn't have to deal with her screaming. This was the best idea ever. Since then we start our bedtime routine way before The Witching Hour and this has helped both her and us with bed time!

We noticed that once we put our baby down to sleep for the evening the first time this was her longest stretch of sleep. She would sleep 3 hours the first few times and then she would stretch it out to 5 hours. Each time she woke up and we feed her and put her back to sleep the length of sleep time decreased from there.  So in the beginning when we started putting her to bed at 7pm, she would sleep until 10, but then she would go from 7pm to 1am. After she woke up at 1am she was up every two hours for the rest of the night until 7am when she was up for the day. So she put herself in the routine of waking up and eating at 1am, 3am, 5am and 7am. After several weeks (around 3 months) she dropped the 3am wake up, so she was getting 2 really good stretches of sleep. At her 4 month appointment the pediatrician said she was gaining weight and she should be able to drop the 1am feed. For this we would need to sleep train her.