July 29, 2007

Sleep in heavenly peace . . .

I know that I've mentioned this in a previous post, but it warrants being mentioned again. Jack slept 8 1/2 hours two nights ago. Now, if you read the post from a day or two ago, you'll know that due to unfortunate circumstances, I didn't get that much sleep. Nonetheless, I was very excited. The last two nights it's been the typical 5 - 6 hours, but we're not complaining.

The other "sleep breakthrough" that we had this week was that both Tuesday and Wednesday night, I put Jack's pajamas on, rocked him for 5 minutes and put him in his crib while he was still awake and he drifted off to sleep on his own. No "crying-it-out" necessary (I knew I liked that Dr. Sears). The nights since then he's fallen asleep while rocking or in the car so we haven't had a chance to try it again, but I'm hoping that it wasn't just a fluke. I'm not naive enough to think that it will always be that easy, but I feel like we're getting somewhere.

I guess it's true that we've rarely had a really hard time putting him to bed. There have been a few cranky nights that have taken quite a bit of rocking (and bouncing on the exercise ball) but rarely does it take more than 1/2 hour (but of course the nights it does take longer are the nights when we have guests or other things we'd like to be able to do). If we start to get him ready when we start to see that he's tired, he does much better than when we let him get all the way to the fussy stage.

This week is a really crazy one. We have two simultaneous camps and ALL of our staff is counseling. We have a couple of people who are helping out, but less help always equals way crazy. Always. Hopefully, Jack will give us more sleep this week!

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