Sleeping

So, how do you get a baby to sleep, anyway?

It's not that we don't have a routine. We do. It's just that recently Rachel has ignored our routine.

I've been reading up on sleep patterns for babies and apparently Rachel should be getting 5 hours worth of naps everyday. That's not a problem with me except that she doesn't nap.

She power-naps. Half an hour and she's done. And she'll only do that once or twice a day.

So, if I "force" her to sleep longer at nap time, will she sleep better at night? That's what all the articles I read said.

I'm not sure I believe them. She's related to my little sister who stayed up for a full 24+ hours after she was born...and who, thirteen years later, still runs on very little sleep.

Little bundles of energy, they are. Rachel seems to push bedtime back for each nap she takes, minute by minute, if she naps more than an hour a day. I don't know though. Is she just overtired?

I do sometimes force her not to have naps (like the 9 o'clock "nap"--that one just has to go. Napping at 9 PM should just be illegal. That's a good bedtime, Rachel. We don't nap at 9 o'clock).

Anyway...we've tried pretty much everything. Baths, singing, reading, rocking, eating...we had a routine that was butchered this week, but has been pretty consistent in the past...

WHAT DO I DO? WHAT DO I DO?

(She's asleep now...so I'm going to bed. We let her cry herself out in her crib...it only took 28 minutes, but that was after our bedtime routine so in total it took about an hour or so to get her to sleep. That's not terrible considering last night we spent, oh, let me pull out my calculator...SEVEN!)