Sleepy time...

Carver has had sleep issues pretty much from day 1. For about the first 4 or 5 weeks he would not sleep more than about an hour or so at a time. We spent that month in an exhausted blur. Daniel and I would have never made it through those first weeks without the help of my mom and Daniel's mom. They happily took nightly shifts so that we could get some much needed sleep.

After the grandmothers left Daniel and I had to figure out what to do next. What we needed was a game plan...

Eventually, we found a solution. Daniel would take a nap from around 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. while I gave Carver his last feeding of the day. Then I would pass him off to Daniel who would sleep with him in the guest room, give him a bottle for his next feeding and then I would take over around 4:00 or so and Daniel would go back to bed.

The next part of the game plan was swaddling Carver SUPER tight; first in a "miracle blanket" and then with a blanket over that for added tightness. Then Daniel furthered our progression towards night sleep when he found some "music" to play on his iPod. This music is actually water sounds and works like white noise. It typically works almost immediately to get Carver into the bedtime sleep zone. Unfortunately, it has to be played ridiculously loud in order to work, but at this point we'll deal with the noise in order to get a little sleep.

Daniel is a champ at swaddling Carver. I am not very good at it at all. Unfortunately for Daniel this means that I wake him up every time Carver has to be swaddled. I love the results of the tight swaddling though I can't help but feel a little sorry for him. Sometimes he looks really pitiful... I can't imagine trying to sleep when unable to move anything except my head--- nightmare. BUT, he seems to find it soothing, so we will keep it up for another month or so.

After a couple of weeks of this Carver was finally sleeping in two really good shifts, first until about 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. and then again until 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. Yay! It seems like we finally passed a major hurdle in this whole parenting thing. This week we all reconvened in our bedroom and it seems to be working out. We'll see how it goes :)