As I think I mentioned in reporting on Sam’s most recent pediatric visit, we’ve learned that now is the time to be helping Sam develop good sleep habits. Everything we’ve heard is that infants and children do best with routine and that a good bed time ritual can really help the whole household. The child knows what to expect. It ends in sleep, so the whole house is calmer, happier. It’s all good.
Our ritual is simple, but perhaps a bit on the long side.
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We play some music and Sam and Dad dance (sway? lurch? wobble?) while Mom draws a bath.
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Mom bathes Sam (singing).
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Dad reads a book to Sam (lullabies in background).
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Mom nurses Sam (soft Enya in background).
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Dad puts Sam to sleep (soft Miles in background). Someone who had foreknowledge of this post, “hoped I’d include the playlist.” I will. It’s here. But it’s an M3U file that references music that you can’t get to. For it to be of any use to you, you’d need to save it to disk and then open it as a text file and just read it. Since I imagine that one person in the world will bother to do this — they very person that asked for the playlist, I’ve put it here in this footnote.
We’ve had this ritual in place for two nights now, and it has failed miserably each night. You can see in this image the huge block of “awake” in the early evening. We started the sleep ritual at a little before 6:00 PM. By 8:30, we gave up, and had dinner. By 9:30, we were at it again, finally getting her to sleep at about 10:40 PM — Over 4.5 hours after we started trying to get her to sleep.
The funny (scary?) thing is that Sam really is a good sleeper. She can put herself back to sleep when she wakes up during the night, and often even when she wakes during naps. Her crib is in our bedroom, so it passes as co-sleeping, even though it’s not family bed. I suspect that this arrangement helps her significantly, though I can’t say for sure.