Sleeping

I never knew how important this was until I could not do it. With this in mind we have decided to give our children the 'gift' of learning how to put themselves to sleep. This is 'parent speak' for we are going to let them self shooth, which is 'parent speak' for crying.

On a related note, but somewhat tangental, I was thinking about the following facts - a baby sleeps between 16 - 18 hours a day and every parent I know is tired, it just does not seem mathmatically possible, but working through the math, I guess it is. To make the math easy lets assume that a baby sleeps 2/3rds of a day and an adult sleeps 1/3rd of a day the probability of both adult and baby being a sleep is 66% * 33% = 21.78% when this is multipled by the number of hours in the day means that there is roughly 5 hours that both parent and baby should be sleeping at the sametime. Clearly the above is assuming that the chance of sleeping is evenly distributed, given that there are two care givers it seems to be that parents should be able to get more sleep, but clearly this not the case (just look at that picture of me below). I think that this has to do that the probability of an infant is actually evenly distributed throughout the day, but this is not true for adults... Glad I got the chance to think through that.

The summary version is that Owen does not seem to care about this and Ava seems to be very opinionated about it and her opinion is that this sucks!!!! The first time we tried this (this was about two weeks ago) Ava worked her self up into such a tizzy that she vomited, which would have been really sad, but OK, if she did not immediately inhail the vomit and start to choke, which is really not good. Needless to say (or maybe not) after this we took a break from trying to give them this 'gift'.

About a week later we decided that we needed to try this again. Given the disaster of the first attempted were appraoched this with a little more caution then we did with the first attempt. We were in fact so nervious that we had a rule that one of us had to be in the room to watch them cry, which is really really not fun - I think that for Tracy this is the equavant to a form of torture. The frist night of 'gift' v2 was really hard. I think that Ava cried on and off for about 2 hours and finally cryed herself to sleep, fourtunately she seemed to have forgotten about this when she woke up for her next feeding and was all smiles when we showed up (I am sure that this will come back to haunt us at some point).


Fast forward two weeks and this actually seems to be working. Both the kids have gotten a lot better