Sweet dreams are made of this

Back in November I wrote a post about Ollie's sleep - or lack there of.  You all showered me with such love and support and I felt a lot better about the fact that he wasn't sleeping through the night and I just accepted it and kept reminding myself, it was a season in life.

I'm happy to report an update today that we've made huge strides in his nighttime sleep - most of it within the last week here - and we're all getting so much more rest than we were before.  

I was all set to start kind of doing some more sleep training with him after his first birthday, but then we hit a couple of bumps, first in finding out about his slight milk allergy and then when he got norovirus.  The week he was actually sick he slept a lot, but then after he was recovered he really regressed in his sleep for a bit.  There was one early Saturday morning in late December that he and I even just slept out on our couch because he wouldn't lay in his crib for anything.

We got past that little bump, but he was back to waking more than once a night, mostly twice, sometimes as much as three times though.  I wouldn't necessarily nurse him all three times, sometimes I just needed to pat his back, hug him and lay him back down or sometimes he just needed to complain for a bit and then put himself back to sleep, but he was definitely waking up a lot.  About a week ago we had kind of a bad night and I decided to look into sleep advice again.  I found an e-book for the Kindle written by a pediatrician that was just released called My Child Won't Sleep: A Quick Guide for the Sleep Deprived Parent.  It is a very short guide to helping kids of all ages sleep better.  So I downloaded it, was all set to follow his tips and advice, talked to Nate about it and we had a plan of action.  But as fate would have it, we didn't even need it - that very night was the first night Ollie finally started sleeping better without us really even having to try anything.

So he can now pretty much sleep 6-8 hours without interruption which is amazing compared to where he was.  He was doing 3-4 hours before this week.  We put him to bed at 7 (still early, he gets up so early during the week unfortunately) and now I can go to bed whenever I want without him waking up and needing me around 10:00 like he used to.  He'll wake up somewhere between 1:00 and 2:00 for just a few minutes then goes back down and sleeps until we get him up in the morning.  I'll take it.  Yes, I did just say he still wakes up once, but you know what, compared to where we were, it's not that bad at all.  I think he'll start phasing that little wake up out pretty soon too but right now I don't mind.  I'd probably be getting up around then for a bathroom break anyway!  

Overall I feel much more rested than I have in quite some time.  I'm not so naive to say that things are going to be perfect from here on out, but I really do feel that we're finally in a good pattern and on the road to having a good sleeper and for that I am pretty thankful!  And hey, how cute is a well rested baby with bed head??