Hellobee

L I L  P A I N T B R U S H  – A L M O S T  5  Y E A R S

If you had asked this even two months ago, I would have responded with a very loud “No!” and then run off into the corner and cried. It’s historically been very, very bad. Horrific at times. I’ve blogged about how we attempted to sleep train and just failed. Earlier this year, we gave up on the whole “sleep training” concept and decided to follow Mini Michelangelo’s lead and wow… WHAT. A. DIFFERENCE. I don’t know if it’s an age thing, or a battle-we-chose-not-to-fight thing… but guess what!? He’s sleeping! Just last week I realized that I hadn’t woken up (multiple times) at night once in the past month and a half. WOOT! That’s a huge victory. It even makes up for the fact that we still have bedtime battles.

So, there is hope! I’m not going to say my kiddo is a rock star sleeper yet… but he’s getting there. And life is much, much better with a little SLEEP in it!

J A M E S  –  4
J  O E  &  N  I C K  –  A L M O S T 4
L I L L Y   –  20  M O N  T H S

James was and is a good sleeper. The first couple of months he had his days and nights reversed, but other than that he slept and napped for long periods of time. Even now he goes down easily and sleeps well. I think he would have been a good napper had it not been for our disaster toddler bed issues.

Joe and Nick are not good sleepers. The first six months of their lives I didn’t sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time. Some of it was early reflux and eating issues, but the sleeping troubles continued after those subsided. They woke up several times a night until after they were a year old. They just don’t seem to sleep much. They gave up their naps completely before they were two. I used to drive in the afternoon just to get them to fall asleep. Now it takes them forever to fall asleep in the evenings and they are up early.

Lilly didn’t sleep through the night until she was 16 months old. She wanted to be held and snuggled all night long. Eventually I gave up and let her co-sleep with us until she was 8 months old. I was so exhausted I just needed to get some sleep. We had to do some CIO with her. Now she takes one afternoon nap and sleeps through the night.

L I L  C B  –  3 Y E A R S

Generally speaking, yes. The best part about Lil’ CB’s sleeping habits is that he is a DEEP sleeper. The kid can seriously fall asleep anywhere and in any position. We’re talking upside-down hanging off his crib; behind chairs; on top of piles of toys… I have picture proof if you want it! He also transfers very well from the car seat or stroller to his bed, so once he is asleep, he stays asleep! Noises don’t bother him either — he doesn’t have a noise machine in his room and he sleeps through the dog barking IN HIS ROOM, to the garage opening under his room, to fireworks outside, etc. It’s pretty remarkable, actually, and I think the fact that he spent the first 15 months of his life sleeping in an apartment in the middle of crazy big, busy Seoul helped him with this.

The one thing that’s tricky is getting him to fall asleep if he’s taken a nap that day. When he doesn’t nap (I’d say he naps between 2-3 times a week), he is out like a light within 2-5 minutes of putting him in his bed between 6:45-7:00pm. If he naps, all bets are off and he won’t fall asleep until somewhere between 9:30 and 10:30pm. What’s hard is that he still wants/needs one of us to stay with him until he falls asleep. We’ve tried to train him away from this, and usually he’s fine on those nights when he hasn’t napped and is out like a light, but on nights when it takes him a long time to fall asleep, it can be a bit rough!

Lil’ CB also used to have some night wakings about 3-4 nights a week, but since he hit about 3.5 years, this has pretty much stopped altogether.

Hoping good sleep patterns continue for Lil’ CB!

C H AR L I E  –  3  1 / 2  Y E A R S
O L I V E  –  2 1  M O N T H S

Olive was not a good sleeper once she was past the sleepy newborn stage. Most of the time she was a 15 minute cat napper unless she was being held until we nap trained her at 8 months. She was the easiest baby to nap train and from that moment on, she became an excellent napper.

Nights were another story. I didn’t think Olive would sleep through the night until I night weaned. She kept catching cold after cold so we didn’t sleep train until 13 months. Since she was so small, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep train her earlier because she was my baby! She was waking up at least 2-4 times a night at that point. Sleeping through the night post sleep training didn’t last very long after the first time we sleep trained because she was sick months 14-15. We finally night trained at 16 months, and she’s slept through the night since. Olive was pretty easy to night train and never cried very long or for more than a day or two.

Even though it was a very long 16 months of nonstop wake-ups, we’ve had 5 straight months of great sleep (knock on wood). I also think a lot of kids’ sleep tends to improve once they’re down to one nap a day, as that was the case for both Charlie and Olive. We have had to have a couple mini training sessions, but she usually only cries a couple minutes (or a couple seconds). It’s always been surprising that she doesn’t cry very long because she is one opinionated young lady!

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Charlie’s sleep started declining around the 2 month mark, and the 4 month sleep regression hit us hard. He was waking up 10+ times a night and would sometimes be up for hours in the middle of the night. We night and nap trained Charlie at 4 1/2 months and he became an excellent sleeper. Nap training was pretty difficult, but night training was easy. Post sleep training he put himself to sleep at naps and night time, slept well in half a dozen different places when we traveled, and I don’t think he even woke up at night once in the 8 months following. At 12 months he did have a regression due to illness, extended traveling, molars, walking, etc. We had some bumpy times here and there after 12 months, but overall he remained a good sleeper. We did have to retrain him at 18 months, but was quick and easy, and he continued to be a good sleeper until he was 2. The only thing I would have changed was that he was an early riser for a long time, but it got a lot better after he dropped to one nap.

From 24 months – 26 months he wanted us to hold his hand through his crib slats until he fell asleep. That resulted in either me or Mr. Bee falling asleep on his floor many nights!

Once we switched to a toddler bed shortly after he turned 2, bedtime became a battle because he was free to walk around. From then until recently, bedtimes have been up and down with good weeks and bad ones. The past 2 months or so it’s improved, but that’s because we’ve pushed his bedtime to 10pm. He often stays awake in his room until 10:30… sometimes later, but he doesn’t leave his room.

I guess overall he has been a pretty good sleeper. He has always been a monster napper, and through his 2’s he regularly took 4+ hour naps every weekend. He’s at an age right now where he still needs a nap, but just a short one because it interferes with his bedtime. I’m hoping that once he drops his nap, bedtime battles will cease and we can move bedtime up much earlier. Then again I’ve heard that being a night owl can be genetic, and Mr. Bee and I are hopeless night owls and I’ve battled insomnia my whole life!

Overall I think they’re both pretty good sleepers. Now eating on the other hand….

W A G O N  J R  –  3 1 / 2  Y E A R S
L I L  M I S S  W A G O N  –  11  M O N T H S

I have been putting off answering this question!!! 

In general, I have been blessed with great sleepers. I am very grateful, every single day.

Wagon Jr. has always been a good sleeper. We sleep trained him at 4 months, then nap trained him at 4.5 months and he has slept through the night since then unless he’s really sick. He is an active sleeper so he often has crying night wakings, but he is always able to fall back asleep on his own. He still naps consistently at 3.5 years old, and sleeps great in the car.

LMW was not a good sleeper in the beginning unless she was in her swing. We never sleep trained her, and she dropped her night feeding and started sleeping through the night around 8 months. She actually STTN for about a week at 6 months, but then she stopped. After she started STTN, her sleep was fantastic. Even though in the past we’d always let her fall asleep drinking her bottle, we could put her down awake and she’d fall asleep on her own with minimal to no crying. Her naps were always over an hour, sometimes up to 3 hours. At almost a year old, she takes 2 long naps a day. She does not sleep well in the car, however. She falls asleep easily in the car, but it’s rare to get a nap of over 30 minutes in the car with her.

L I T T L E  J A C K S  – 3  Y E A R S
J A C K  J A C K  – 1 5  M O N T H S

Jack Jack is the best sleeper that I know! She goes down like clockwork and without any fuss at 7 pm and doesn’t wake until 7 am. She started doing this at 4 months of age without sleep training (which wasn’t a good approach for either of our girls). We had, however, learned a ton about what not to do with Little Jacks and we took a pretty textbook approach to setting great sleep habits. I think that those great habits combined with her biology made her the best sleeper!

Little Jacks on the other hand is now and has always been a horrible sleeper! Sleep training was NOT an option for her based on her temperament. Ironically, she slept really well for the first 4 months of her life. Then, the 4 month sleep regression hit, and life was forever changed. There were times when she would wake up 10-12 times a night. It was tough! We tried CIO and realized that it was incredibly bad for her. She escalated into absolute panic with every attempt. So, we made it work and got through the tough times knowing that they would eventually pass. By age 2, she pretty reliably started sleeping through the night, to our relief. Though her definition of night is definitely different than ours. She goes to bed at 10 no matter what we do and wakes up at 7. Her naps are generally only an hour. The sad fact is that she probably just doesn’t need as much sleep as other kids and has a more fragmented sleep pattern.

D R A K E  – 3 Y E A R S
B A B Y  C H O C O L A T E  –  J U S T  B O R N !

Drake has never been a good sleeper. Part of me wonders if it had to do with our poor breastfeeding experience in that he was always hungry, and so he would always wake up. Even after he was getting enough, he was in a pattern to wake more easily. He has always been a light sleeper and even the smallest sounds wake him up now, so that’s probably just him. I never really sleep trained, but to be honest I don’t even remember his first year very well because of how poor of a sleeper he was, causing me to not sleep well at all either. At 3 now naps are hard and he will go for a few days without one and then crash one day which tells me he isn’t ready to drop his napeven if he fights them. At night he can stay up to 10 or 11 easy some nights entertaining himself. So I don’t think he is a good sleeper at all and some of it might have be caused by us and some of it might be genetic as Mr. Chocolate is a poor sleeper as well.

R  +  M – 2  Y E A R S

Both R + M are great sleepers, which I attribute to keeping them brutally scheduled for the first 18 months of their life. Actually, who am I kidding? They are 27 months and still incredibly scheduled. They always slept in their cribs, which is something I was encouraged to do and keep them out of our room. I would go into their space to feed them. Because feedings were scheduled, we had control of the space between each feed. By four months they were on regularly scheduled naps and sleeping through the night {we dropped the “dream feed” around then}. By six months they would do twelve hour stretches.

When they turned one we dropped to one nap, which we kept pushing later into the afternoon.

Mr. C. and I are sleep lovers and definitely not early risers. Sometimes R + M are but we feel lucky that they have each other. Typically they wake up in the morning, throw toys in between in crib and laugh and play with each other. That buys a minimum of a half hour. Twin perks!!!

N O E L L E  –  2  1 / 2 Y E A R S
J A R E N —  4  M O N T H S

Noelle is a great sleeper. She has always been an amazing nap taker (naturally) – all her naps were 2-hours long for as long as I can remember. Her routine has been in place a long long time, and she was STTN by 5 months. We rarely have to fight her to get her to sleep, and she doesn’t get up in the middle of the night for any reason. Once we sleep trained her at 6 weeks, we have never had to retrain her.

I think Jaren is a pretty good sleeper for not having any sort of sleep training or routine in place. He can sleep in his crib, and at 4-months old, he only wakes up once a night, which I think is pretty good. He just doesn’t have set, predictable naps or a solid bedtime yet.

However, neither one of my kids seem to be stroller or carseat sleepers!

B A B Y  C H E C K E R S  –  2  Y E A R S

I think relatively speaking, historically and now, Baby Checkers has been a fairly good sleeper.

Everyone says how newborns just sleep all day . . . perhaps it’s because I suffered from insomnia, I felt like after her first 2 weeks up until about 3 months, she wasn’t a great sleeper (often needing to sleep being rocked, held, shushed, etc.

But once we she hit that 3 month stretch, we hit a sweet spot in sleep rhythms, and we didn’t really need to train her until around 5.5 months. We did a modified version of CIO, and after about 1.5 weeks, she was sleep-trained with a few minor regressions (in retrospect) here and there.

Naps were always more of a challenge for us than bedtime, but ever since we moved to one nap, she naps like a charm. Her naps are anywhere from 2.5 – 4 hours during the day, and she sleeps about 10 hours at night. She is never (ever) asleep when we put her down at bedtime because she takes about 30 – 40 minutes to wind down (sing loudly, talk to all of her stuffed animals, repeat phrases from the day, dance in her crib) before she passes out.

L I T T L E  Y  –  2 Y E A R S

Little Y started off a fairly average sleeper, and became a good one. When he was an infant, he always woke up an average number of times (every couple hours when he was tiny, tapering to twice a night until around 8 months).

From 8 months to about a year, he stubbornly held on to one night waking. It was easy to deal with — I’d go in, nurse him fairly quickly, and he’d go back down easily. Still, I could have done without. I made a half-hearted attempt at CIO a couple times, but he just seemed to escalate with crying, and I decided it wasn’t worth it — I could deal with once a night as long as it was quick.

Sure enough, when he started self-weaning (a process that lasted from roughly 12-15 months) he started sleeping through the night on his own. He’s now just shy of 2 years and I literally have been in his room once in the middle of the night in the past year! He sleeps 11 hours every night pretty much without fail. We’ve had the very occasional early wakeup, but I can’t complain at all.

I’d say he was also an average napper who became a good one. From months 4-7ish he was a notorious 45-minute cat napper, which drove me crazy. Once he was able to get past that hump and get down to two naps, he was great. Now that he takes one nap, it’s usually 2 hours, and sometimes 3. He doesn’t fight it.

One thing I’ll say I think we’ve really lucked out on is regressions … I’ve just never noticed any major ones. His sleep has either stayed the same or gotten better, but I don’t think it’s ever gotten worse (unless he’s sick or something).

I’m just crossing my fingers that his sleep stays as solid once we transition him out of his crib! I’m cautiously optimistic, as he’s fairly adaptable.

J A C O B I  –  1 6  M O N T H S

Jacobi is now 16 months and we’ve had our ups and downs with sleep! We’ve reached a place where we are all very happy, but didn’t get there until he turned one.

In the beginning J would only sleep in our arms. I would swaddle him then nurse him to sleep as a NB, lay him gently in the cosleeper next to our bed and within 20 minutes he’d be awake. For the first few weeks Mr. Pen and I had to take turns holding him all. night. long. At 3-4 weeks old we started letting him sleep with us. At 6 weeks he was finally able to take naps alone (on our bed), but it wasn’t until 4 months that he started sleeping in his own crib. From months 3-6 he had a TERRIBLE regression. I would put him down at 7pm and he’d wake up an hour later screaming and wouldn’t go back down until midnight. With him waking up at 6 or 7 am (with multiple night wakes), it meant I was getting very little sleep for months.

At 6 months old I finally sleep trained. I didn’t even tell Mr. Pen because he was very against it. It took a little over a week, but it worked! He even started to sleep through the night for about a month, until we moved to a new apartment, then he regressed again. But even then it was manageable because it was only 1-2 wakings each now.

Naps have always, always been wonderful though. When he started napping outside my arms at 6 weeks he would often take 3-hour naps! That’s a huge reason we bought a video monitor — I was constantly checking to see if he was still breathing! He has always slept more than the averages for his age. At 16 months he is still sleeping about 16 hours total.

I would say in general we lucked out with this baby!

B A B Y  C O N F E T T I – 1 3  M O N T H S

Little C is 13 months and his sleep has really ebbed and flowed, from awful to great. The first three months are such a blur of exhaustion on my end that it is hard to really remember, but he was always a sleepy guy, never wanting much more than an hour of wake time before taking another nap (mostly in the swing back then).

Around the three month mark, we dropped the swaddle cold turkey (Grandma Confetti’s idea on vacation), and he immediately rolled to his tummy and his long stretches went from 5 hours to 7-8 hours (even though the stomach sleeping gave me a heart attack – but he got there on his own).

C hit every traditional “sleep regression” with gusto – 4, 6, 9 and 12 month. He rarely had late night wakings, but would have one (or many in the earlier months) early morning wakings, often deciding that 4-5 am was a great time to be awake for the day. Around 6 months (after I was done weaning), we did “sleep train” with CIO to help him get past his last early morning feeding, which was clearly mostly for comfort/soothing back to sleep and less about hunger.

We nap trained around 6 months, and while we have had some rough blips in time, for the most part, he has been a good napper in his own crib since then (although as I write this, he is boycotting his nap in his crib, so…yeah….sleep is an evolving adventure in the Confetti house).

S C R I B B L E S  –  10  M O N T H S

As of now, I must say yes! At first he slept so well that we had to wake to feed. Around the 3 month mark I thought I just had an evolved child that had no sleep issues; around this time he was waking once a night. Then the four month regression hit and we realized that our lazy sleep behavior was probably contributing to his problems. We had a terrible time sleep training him (it took us almost 2 months of crying, progress, plateaus, and backsliding). But seemingly without our assistance, Scribble started sleeping through around 7 months and hasn’t had any trouble since then. Sometimes a few tears at bedtime but nothing else. He also naps insanely well. He napped in arms almost exclusively for the first three months, then his naps consolidated and he has been a great napper ever since. He wakes up between 7:00and 8:00, nurses, then sleeps until 10:30 or 11:00. Then he takes an afternoon nap from around 1:00 to 3:00, sometimes longer. We have been so lucky with him! I cross my fingers that it continues this way…

L I L  T E A C U P  –  1 1  M O N T H S

We have had a little of each I think.

From the very beginning, Little Tea Cup has been a good sleeper at night. She went for fairly long stretches and I remember having to wake her to eat in those first few weeks as my milk supply was building. That seems crazy to me now — did I seriously wake my sleeping baby ha! I know it’s important to do it, but it seems so wrong!

The daytime sleep however was another story. Little Tea Cup was not a fan of sleeping during the day at all. Sometimes she would rest in my arms but for very very short intervals. I can count on one hand the decent longer naps we got in those early days.

Around 6 weeks I was tired, frustrated and like a shining glimmer of hope my Moms on Call book arrived in the mail. I sat there with my baby in my arms and read the sleep section and implemented it that afternoon. I won’t say it fixed things immediately, but it certainly helped things very quickly. By 8 weeks Norah slept through the night for the first time and naps were improving every day. We never really had to do CIO and for that I am grateful, but we did have to allow her to figure things out from time to time and thankfully she is a quick learner.

Now I would consider her a generally good sleeper. However we are strict with our schedule and routines to help her get enough good quality sleep.

T R I K E S T E R  –  7  M O N T H S

Now, I’d classify the Trikester as a good sleeper (though I might regret jinxing things like that). We waited until 6.5 months to sleep train, but now he goes to sleep earlier, wakes up less, and sleeps later in the morning. His naps are longer and more consistent and he’s in a much better mood overall. I don’t have one of those kids that can fall asleep anywhere — he has to be in his crib, in a dark room, with the white noise machine running. Sadly, he doesn’t sleep in a stroller or car seat, so we try to be home at nap times.

Historically, the Trikester was an awful sleeper!! He wasn’t a sleepy newborn, and from 2 weeks on we had to fight for every hour of sleep. We spent a lot of time co-sleeping and and dealt with frequent wake-ups. I’d say he was a difficult baby in this sense (actually, in every sense), but I have nothing to compare it too, so maybe it’s just the norm. 

B A B Y  M A R K E R S  –  4  M O N T H S

Baby Markers is a great sleeper – which I usually hesitate to admit to other sleep-deprived mamas! From the day she was born, she gave us at least a 6 hour stretch at night. Trust me, I am VERY GRATEFUL!!!

We did not have to sleep train for night time sleep. When she was about 3 weeks old, I decided to put her in her bassinet all swaddled up, give her a pacifier and see what would happen. Luckily for us, she fell right asleep! That’s been the routine every since, with modifications along the way. Now at 5 months she’s in a sleep sack and we turn on her lullaby music and sound machine, sing her one song and lie her down. She almost always falls right asleep on her own. From that point she now sleeps an average of 10 hours every night without waking up once. When people ask me how we achieved this miracle, I usually shrug and say “magic?” because I truly think it was just the luck of the draw!

Naps have always been a struggle but we are finally getting them down – and we’re in the middle of nap training right now! I’m determined to break us of the “rock-sing-sway-ssshhh” routine that typically takes me 20+ minutes for each nap. And I must mention that I’m the ONLY one she’ll fall asleep for, she will scream for everyone else including her daddy.  More to come on how we’re surviving the nap training process!

I S A I A H  – 4  M O N T H S

I’ve always been cautious to tell people, but Isaiah has slept through the night since birth (if we’re calling 5-6 hours sttn, which I do). His doctor was concerned at the length he was going between bottles, but Isaiah has always been a healthy weight, so I let him dictate the schedule.

Around 2.5 months I noticed that keeping him up until 9-10 wasn’t working as well, so I tried on a whim one night to put him down at 7 since he was consistently taking a nap then, and he slept 12 hours. I would much rather not be stuck at home beginning around 6 to start the bedtime routine, but for 12 hours of sleep I’ll do just about anything. He goes down at 7pm, wakes up at 5am, takes his pacifier, sleeps until 6, takes his pacifier and then gets up for the day at 7am.

At 14 weeks we went through a sleep regression where he woke up every hour or so, but we pulled through…at least until the next one comes.

But he is not a very good napper. They did get significantly better when I started letting him take naps on his tummy. They’re sporadic and not very long/good quality. I’m considering nap training when he gets a little older if it doesn’t work out on its own.

B A B I E S  B L U E  –  4  M O N T H S

I’m kind of scared to answer this question and jinx us, but . . . I think we have okay sleepers. The first 10 week were HARD. They never went more than 2 1/2 – 3 hours between feedings. They napped sporadically for 20-40 minutes after their awake time. I knew they were born early and might need some more time, but I was pretty scared that we were never, ever going to sleep more than an hour at a time. Finally, around 10 weeks, we convinced them to drop one night feeding. At 14 weeks, we decided to sleep train. We had a couple of rough nights, but now they typically go to sleep with no crying at all. If they do cry, it’s usually just fussing for less than 5 minutes. They sleep from about 8 p.m. to 5 a.m.

As for naps, we nap trained at the same time as sleep training. They do fuss more going down for naps, but it is generally still under 5 minutes of crying. Post-sleep training, they nap for about 1 1/2 – 2 hours.

We worked really hard to instill good sleep habits from the beginning. From the time they were newborns, we had “awake” time after feeding, even if it was only long enough for a diaper change. We tried to put them down drowsy as often as we could. We worked hard to not develop any sleep “crutches.” That said, because they took to sleep training so well at a pretty young age, I think part of our success might be that they were predisposed to being decent sleepers.

I’m nervously waiting on pins and needles to see what happens when they hit the infamous 4-month sleep regression. I may have to revise my answer after that, but let’s hope not!

L I T T L E  L I O N  –  4  M O N T H S

Compared to stories I hear from other moms, Little Lion is an excellent sleeper. He has always slept in his crib at night (his room is right across the hall from ours) so we never had to wean him off the pack and play. We just recently went cold turkey with the swaddle, and he struggled a bit during naps, but never had a problem at night. He goes to bed without a fuss at night, and sleeps from about 6:30-2am, eats, then sleeps until 6:15 or so. We still have that one night feeding, and sometimes he wakes up ready to play at 5:30 am (ick!) but we are pretty thankful! Naps are another story….we haven’t quite figured these out yet. Sometimes he sleeps in his crib with no problem, sometimes we rely on the swing. Sometimes he refuses to nap and we go run errands, and he will fall asleep in the carseat. Constant work in progress, but we do ok .

We did the best we could to start as we mean to go on, so there hasn’t really been a need for sleep training. We occasionally have to use progressive waiting and some shush patting, but we haven’t needed to do any hardcore sleep training. We have always put him down drowsy, so we are hoping we won’t have to!

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Is your little one a good sleeper? Did you sleep train?