Sleep...

I've been meaning to post about my favorite subject for a while. Sit back and relax... this may be a long one.

K (2) doesn't need a lot of sleep. Her older sister N (4) has always been a champion sleeper. When N was 2, she would sleep from about 9 pm until 9 am or 12 hours after she went to bed... She often didn't go to bed until 10 pm (ish) so then she would sleep until 10 am. My husband and I knew we had a great sleeper.

In addition, N would usually take 3-hour long naps when she was 2. We were lucky. We rejoiced. Enter Miss K. From the time she was born, she slept less than N did and she was 2 years 4 months younger. At age 2, Miss K is going to bed around 10 or 11 and then waking up around 8 am. She'll take a nap that is about 2 hours long. We can't believe it. At age 2, Miss N was sleeping about 15 hours a day and Miss K is only sleeping 12 hours.

Miss T seems to be a fairly good sleeper... Not as good as N, but better than K. T goes to sleep around 8:30 or 9 and wakes up once to nurse at night (either 1 am ish or 4 am ish) and then sleeps until at least 7:45, but sometimes until 9 am. Miss N currently goes to bed between 9 and 10 and gets up between 8:30 and 10 am depending. No more naps for her. She outgrew them last fall. (I thought I'd be more sad when it happened than I was. She really was done with them. When she would nap she'd stay up until midnight. When she wouldn't nap she'd be out at 9 pm on the dot! It made things easier not to have to juggle nap schedules of 3 kids too.)

The newest development on the sleep front with Miss K is that she won't sleep in her crib any more. She learned how to climb out of her crib at the beginning of May. Since then she's been sleeping with me. A lot. She used to just wake up in the middle of the night and come in bed. Then she stopped wanting to go to sleep in her crib. I started snuggling with her in my bed, to help her fall asleep, then moving her to her crib after she fell asleep. Sometimes she comes back to sleep with me in the middle of the night. When she comes back, I have to do "baby juggling." I have to get K to sleep again and then in the portable crib before T (10 months) wakes up to nurse. Then T comes in for either a quick nursing session, or for nursing and a couple of hours of cuddling too. Then I have to get T back to her crib before K demands to be back in bed with me.

When it's bed time, K will say, "Put on your pjamamas and snuggle Mommy." Or "Go Mommy's bed. You come too?!" She won't snuggle with her Dad, it has to be me. She'll fall asleep as I'm doing work on my laptop and sitting on the bed beside her.

It's a little crazy at night. Most nights, I'm up and down 3 or 4 times a night. In the last month, I've had a few nights of uninterrupted sleep and they were the nights when I didn't notice the monitor was down. I guess I got a couple of other nights a couple of weeks ago, but in general, I'm up a lot at night. I'm functioning pretty well considering how little sleep (for me) I'm getting.

To close, I thought I'd share some pictures from when K was a newborn. (You deserve the pictures if you've read this whole post!) It seemed like she hardly slept. I remember big blue eyes wide open a lot. She'd stay awake for hours and hours at a stretch. We were all shocked. Here are a few pictures that show those eyes, her big blue eyes, wide open. This one was taken when she was one-day old and ready to leave the hospital.

Here she is10-days old. Note the big wide eyes. 18-days old and wide eyed! And here's a rare, sweet one of her sleeping. (I just love those little puckered up lips!)

(N slept a lot as a baby, K hardly at all, and T perhaps even more than N. Go figure this sleep thing! I just want a little more on a slightly regular basis.)