Sunday, April 28, 2013

Sleep (Or Lack Thereof)

I've posted a few times about how Anna does not like to nap. For the past few months she has rarely napped in the bassinet or crib, and the only way I could get her to sleep for any length of time was having her in the Beco or letting her sleep on my chest. Not ideal. There was the odd time she would have a 2+ hour nap in the bassinet and I would think "maybe she's turning over a new leaf! This is it!" But it was always a fluke.
I have to admit, sometimes this lack of napping has been extremely frustrating. For the most part, she's a very happy and content baby, even when obviously exhausted. But when she gets cranky and fights sleep for an hour, only to nap for 10 minutes, it drives me crazy. I don't know why she fights sleep so much, and has since she was 2 months old. When Grace was a baby, if she was tired she slept. That was all there was to it. At this age Grace had regular naps and was sleeping through the night.
Until recently Anna was sleeping great at night, which made her non-napping ways easier to handle. She was sleeping from 8pm - 5am so we decided to move her to the crib and have her share a room with Grace. This went well for a few days, but for the past few weeks she's been waking up 2-3 times per night. Because she's in Grace's room I've been going to get her quickly rather than let her fuss for a bit so that she doesn't wake Grace up. I'm not comfortable letting her cry but sometimes she wakes up and just makes noise and kicks her feet but I go get her anyway so she doesn't disturb Grace.
I've accepted the fact that we need to work on this. I've started to look into some sleep training methods, something I never even had to think about with Grace because she was such an awesome sleeper right from the start. We decided to give up the playroom for a while and move the crib in there so Anna can have her own room. We made the switch today and moved most of the toys downstairs. Grace seems excited to have a 'new' playroom in the basement so hopefully she won't miss having one upstairs (the only downside is that it is less convenient for me to have it downstairs).
My plan this week is to really work on getting Anna into a regular nap routine and hopefully get her sleeping for more than 10 minutes at a time. Wish me luck!