I do not understand why bedtime is so difficult for Lydia. Throughout the day she does really well with naps. She is excellent at falling asleep in her swing or even by herself in her Pack N Play. If I put her in her crib for a nap, she might fuss a little bit but 99% of the time she is asleep within 10 minutes.

For her late night feeding (generally sometime between 10 & 11) and for any middle of the night feedings, she also sleeps very well. For those I change her diaper (at late night feed), feed her, then simply lay her in her crib. She may take a few minutes to fall asleep, but she never cries after those feedings. Just wiggles and grunts a bit then falls asleep.

But for some reason her early evening feeding + bedtime does NOT go well. In the past I had been feeding her then doing some bedtime "waketime" activities (bath, PJ's, clean diaper, rocking, singing, etc). When that wasn't seeming to work, I decided to do the bedtime activities first then feed her... since obviously she was doing well at other nighttime feedings where I'd feed her then put her straight back to bed. And it has seemed that she's been falling asleep around 9:30 (I hope to move that earlier eventually).

So anyway, tonight I got her all snug in her PJ's, turned off the lights and settled down in the rocking chair to feed her at 9:00. After eating she was still awake (even though she'd been up for over an hour which is usually the point at which she gets sleepy), so I let her have a paci and rocked & sang to her for a little bit. At 9:30 I put her in her crib with the paci and walked away. Forty five minutes later she FINALLY fell asleep.

No, I did not make her cry for 45 minutes. In fact, most of that time she was not crying... just making noises and generally not settling down. I went in about halfway through to see if she needed to burp and check if she'd spit up on she sheets... she had, so I scooched her further down in the crib out of the wet spot, returned the paci that she'd spit out, and left again. Still it took until 10:15 for her to fall asleep.

I don't get it. Every single time she goes to sleep she has very little trouble except for this ONE time... bedtime. The only difference really is that I rock her and sing to her for a little bit before putting her down (and the paci, but she had trouble before and thus the reason why I decided to try the paci to see if it would help her settle). I love my time singing to her and want that to help cue her that it is time to go to sleep for the night... I really hope that that isn't cuing her to fight sleep instead!

Any moms out there had this problem and figured out a way to deal with it? I honestly don't understand why only this one time of the day is so difficult for her... she falls asleep so well every other time!
Labels: edit post
0 Responses

Post a Comment