A few weeks after Baby Carrot was born, it became apparent that she was one of those supremely alert babies. She would be awake much longer than I had observed in friends’ babies and she was a lot more responsive to stimulus than most babies seemed to be, constantly looking around her environment and trying to explore.

As we got closer to her starting daycare and me going back to work, I became somewhat obsessed with learning anything and everything about baby sleep and figuring out how to get Baby C on a schedule. This desire was not only for her sake and making sure that she was getting enough sleep, but also for mine – I thrive on routine, and having a limited amount of time to allocate for us to spend together as a family and for Mr. Carrot and I to have some time for ourselves meant getting a schedule in place.

Thankfully, we had a very easy time getting into a groove. Baby Carrot transitioned to the crib from the Rock n’ Play easily at 3 months, and started sleeping 5-7 hour stretches, with one or two feedings in between. Over time, she phased out the night feeding on her own, and at about 10 months, she stopped falling asleep immediately after the bottle, which presented our first test of whether she would be able to put herself asleep without any intervention. She did just fine, which I owe to learning at daycare to settle down for naps without help, but with that transition, we also got into a new pattern – inconsistent bedtimes, mornings, and domino-effect naps.

I have a hard time with deviation, and it’s especially so when it comes to Baby C because I always think there must be a reason for why something is happening. After her newfound independence, her bedtime moved by nearly an hour, and would vary anywhere between 7:15 and 8:00, and her amount of sleep shrunk from 12 hours to 10 on an average night. Was she not tired enough, or maybe too tired to settle down? Maybe she wasn’t napping enough or too much? Was she teething or approaching a Wonder Week or something else entirely?

It turns out that my unusually alert baby is also a lower sleep needs baby, and the inconsistencies in her day to day sleep patterns are likely just human nature – after all, don’t we all have those days when we find it hard to fall asleep or wake up earlier than usual? In a perfect world, yes, I’d love to know that she’ll be asleep by 7:30 and will sleep solidly until 6:30 the morning, and that she’ll take naps at the same exact time every day, and maybe as she gets older we’ll get more of that consistency. But for now, we’ve learned that some inconsistency is OK.

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Happy morning baby

Here are a few things that we do consistently, despite the inconsistency:

1) Keep our evening routine: We try to keep Baby C’s evenings pretty consistent – dinner at 6, bath time at 6:45 and bedtime/in the crib by 7:15 after a few minutes of reading and cuddling. Some nights, Baby C falls asleep within minutes. Other nights, she’s up for an hour before falling asleep. As long as she’s not unhappy, we let her be and go about our evening, and she’s rarely unhappy, though occasionally she’ll figure out that she can’t pick up the blanket she tossed out of her crib and gets mad.

2) Schedule naps day to day: Baby C has a very consistent day at daycare Monday-Friday, but on weekends, we tend to plan naps based on when she woke up and in keeping with our goal bedtime of 7:30-8 PM. Having observed Baby C’s patterns over this year, we noticed that she generally needs about 12 hours of “awake” time, so we plan the day around that. If she wakes up at 5:30, and we want her to fall asleep by 7:30-8, we’ll do 2 naps of 1 hour each (to space the day out evenly); or if she sleeps later, we’ll do one nap or a couple shorter ones to stay close to that 12 hour time frame. A lot of sleep management professionals advise for a more consistent approach to naps, but we find that it works better for Baby C if we go off how she feels and a more general “awake time” approach.


An occasional car nap (favorite blankie included)

Baby C is 16 months old now, and there’s no doubt that her sleep patterns will continue to evolve. They may become more consistent or less so, and we’ll navigate those changes accordingly. Until then, I’m learning to be a bit more consistent in my acceptance of the inconsistent.

Do you have a child with inconsistent sleep schedules?