Setback Night

There are a lot of things I'm learning about our 7 1/2 week old daughter. One of them is that there will be setbacks from time to time. As frustrating as that is, I'm working hard not to let it stress me out or worry me. An example of what I'm talking about has to do with Corinne's sleeping schedule...

For over a week she had gotten to the point where she was giving us 6 hour stretches of sleep at night. She would eat around 10pmish and then we would put her to bed around 10:45pm, and she was sleeping until 4:30 or 5 am. This was heavenly!! I was getting super confident and things seemed to be getting easier!

Then a few days ago I was reading that around 7 or 8 weeks, babies develop an earlier bedtime. This "clicked" for us because we've been noticing that Corinne would get so so tired around 7 or 8 pm. No problem, I thought, we'll try the earlier bedtime idea. So last evening after an 8pm feeding we tried to put her to bed just before 9pm since she was looking really tired. Well...Corinne didn't really take to that idea even though we could tell how tired she was. She proceded to cry off and on, we proceded to check on her off and on, pick her up, soothe her, etc. until I finally ended up feeding an awake Corinne around 11pm. Ugh. We knew we might be in for a rough night since A) we had tried something new and B) she was now off her previous schedule of being fed and in bed before 11pm.

Sure enough, Corinne woke up at 2:30am. Whoa. I had already forgotten what that was like, since we had gotten spoiled with her 6 hour stretches! And then she woke again at 6am. What a night. We call these "Setback Nights". (Unfortunately, we have a name for them, which tells you it's happened before!)

So, the question becomes, do we go back to the old schedule which seemed to be working well (and will she even go back to that?) or do we try to work on that earlier bedtime? Hmm. We're not sure. But, at least it's the weekend. Another thing I've learned is that it's good to try new things on the weekend when things are a little easier with Brett around and there is a better possiblity of getting a nap. Perhaps you should check back in a day or two and we'll let you know how things turned out!