I miss my kids. I figured I needed to start with that. I noticed the other day that when I got home from work, I was exhausted and it was difficult to keep my eyes open as my daughter tried to tell me about her day. What kind of mother am I that even a simple 5 minute conversation with my 6 year old was difficult?? The working kind of mother I guess. That's the easy way out. I realized then and there that I NEEDED more sleep. I vowed that I'd need to get AJ on some sort of structured schedule for sleeping. He was at a point where he was waking up at least once or twice a night. And unfortunately, Rick sleeps right through it, so there was no help from him.
Friday night was a good start. We have settled on an every other day bath time for AJ, right before his "dinner" bottle. Friday night's routine went like this: He had a bath around 7:45pm, complete with a mini baby massage. I used warm water and mixed in a couple of capfuls of Johnson & Johnson's Bedtime Bath along with his regular baby soap and cleaned him up. He seemed so relaxed, so I knew he was enjoying it. I took him out, wrapped him up in his baby towel and took him to get dressed. I dried him off, tickled his tummy a bit and then put on a fresh diaper, his PJ's and then brushed his hair. I cuddled with him in bed as Rick prepared and brought up a bottle. I feed AJ and within minutes, he had consumed 3 of the 5 ozs and was fast asleep. He was asleep by about 8:15pm and slept until about 1:15am Saturday. It was amazing! He slept straight through 5 hours. He got up around 1:15am and had a diaper change, a few ozs and was back to sleep in about 15 minutes (1:30am). He slept through again until 5:30am. It was AMAZING! While 5:30 is really early for me (since I didn't go to bed until 10:30am) Rick took care of him while I went back to sleep. The extra 2 hours did me well because I was up and rearing to go at 7:30am. It made for a great day!
We had such a success that we followed a modified routine (minus the bath) on Saturday, which worked out well. We did another bath routine yesterday (Sunday night) with even greater success. This time, he took a shower with Daddy while I prepped everything and the poor thing was starting to nod off in the shower! He was out by 8:30am and slept until well past 2:30am. He was up for little bit, had about 2 ozs and was out until 5:45am this morning. Not bad! He's down to only 1/2 a bottle during the night. I'm hoping that as he heads into this next growth spurt that he will eat a little more before bed and then we can eliminate that 2am feeding. Here's to hoping for continued success!
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