Newbies

Trixie has four friends who are newbie parents.  So, that got us thinking about infants and how much they sleep and how we will frequently hear newbie parents tell us that they are going to put their infant on a schedule.  And how we then nod politely before leaving the room and doubling over with maniacal laughter.

If you try to put your newborn infant on a sleep schedule, it will fail miserably, UNLESS the schedule that you decide on is the one that came with the infant.  Remember that your little bundle has been developing sleep habits during fetal development and that is not going to change just because the bundle no longer resides in utero.

When baby arrives, he or she will sleep as much as 18 hours per day, usually in 4-6 hour increments.  If your friend's mother's cousin's sister-in-law's baby slept through the night from birth, please note that she was LUCKY and that that is extremely uncommon behavior.  Or, perhaps this baby's parents are putting whiskey on the binky, like Trixie's parents did so long ago, but that, of course, is another story.  For the first month, baby will sleep when he or she feels like it and you should sleep then too.

Waah.  Waah.  We know you have jobs and responsibilities and need time to do 100 loads of laundry stunk up with milk puke.  Trust us: learn to nap and learn to go to bed early.  That's why God invented TiVo.

REM sleep, or dream sleep, starts at about six weeks of age.  Coincidentally, that is also around the time that a baby learns to smile.  So now, if  you are ever on Jeopardy and there is an "Arcane Sleep Factoids" category, you can use that.  Also around this time, babies shorten the amount of time they sleep each day and may even stay asleep for longer periods of time.

Three months of age is the earliest that you should expect to have success with a sleep schedule, since that is the earliest that a baby is likely to sleep for six hours or so at night.  And if you think that the NKOTB is going to stay asleep longer than that, well, I have news for you: that's what his teenage years are for.  It's not gonna happen.

So, instead of setting up unachievable expectations, just settle in, learn to take naps and adapt your schedule to baby's instead of expecting it to work the other way around.