B.A.B.E. Week 30: Sleep continues to devolve & schedule take 2

Elle on her first swing ride!

Last week I wrote about how I may not start a schedule for 3 more weeks…well I have changed my mind.   This past week has been fun but Elle is more tired than ever.  On the fun side, over Thanksgiving, we went to Grand Cayman island (a British territory) and Elle is enthralled with the world.  On the tired side, Elle has been crankier than her normal happy self, which I attribute to not getting enough sleep.

Despite a little crankiness, this past week was super fun for Elle as we drove around Grand Cayman and had great beach time with her dad.  We also stayed with some friends – a really wonderful family with the girls  (ages 7 and 9).  All three girls were loving with each other and as a bonus, the family has a basset hound named Bruno.   A gentle slobbery dog who let the older two girls 'abuse' him when he was a baby so I felt safe allowing Elle do the same.  We tried to teach her to gently pet Bruno but she still loved to grab his hair and squeal with delight.

All this stimulation has led Elle down the path of not getting her 14 hours of needed sleep per day.  So…even with more travel coming up and a full docket of work and guests back to a schedule.   

Here’s my proposal for a schedule:

Eating: 7:30 am, 11:30, 3:30, 7:30

Sleeping: 9:30 am, 2:00, 4:30.

Night time: 9 pm-6:30am

Here’s how it actually went from Monday night to Tuesday night:

Eating

We were able to get Elle to eat roughly at the scheduled times (except nursing late at night or early in the morning).   Elle ate some banana in the morning, carrots for lunch, and rice cereal for late afternoon in addition to breast milk.   We went out to dinner and so we stuffed Elle with rice cereal in the late afternoon before going out to dinner.  Elle surprised us by how much rice cereal she ate (had to refill her bowl four times).  

In her eating schedule, there are few extra notes.   The first is that eating at a specific time means that she starts eating sometime around then.  And then that eating can go for  an hour or so between breastfeeding and putting solids in her mouth.  This happened in an extreme manner when I nursed her at 3:10 after waking from a nap.  She immediately went back to sleep and didn’t consume her large amounts of cereal until 4:10 when she re-awoke from her nap.

Sleeping

In accordance with the schedule, Elle did roughly sleep 9 hours Monday night – in our bed with occasional wake-ups to feed.  She then slept from 9:30-10, 12-12:20 (just fell asleep playing on the floor), 2-3:10, 3:20-4, 6:30-8, 9pm bedtime again.  Roughly adding up to 13.5 hours.  

We are trying the “schedule” again today but will modify the second feeding time to 11:15 am and nap time to 1 pm so that she can actually get that 4:30 nap in and won’t be so tired.   With the schedule, Elle seemed much happier but maybe it is also just being at home again… we are loving being home and having  more close friends visiting us.