Perchance to dream...

Grant, to put it kindly, is not a great sleeper. He slept eight hours the second day of his life, and that was enough for him. When I hear mothers talk about how their newborns slept all the time or how they'd have to wake their baby to eat, I want to scream. Don't tell me your baby starting sleeping 12 hours a night at six weeks old. Don't tell me your baby drifts off for a nap with a smile on her face and wakes, still smiling, two hours later. I don't want to hear it.

Let me clarify - I'm not expecting my 3-month-old to sleep through the night (although, I will point out, 90% of babies his age do just that). What I want is for him to wake once, maybe twice, during the night, eat some food and then go back to sleep. No waking up an hour later for no apparent reason, no crying out, no moans and whimpers, no need for rocking or shushing in the middle of the night. I want naps that last longer than a commercial break and no tantrums beforehand.

Go. To. Sleep.

Leigh and I have managed until this point. But between me going back to work in three weeks and the dirty looks from the neighbors, we've decided to get serious about getting this kid to sleep.

We have not been dissuaded by the warnings of "there's nothing you can do, they just need to grow out of it." Leigh and I being who we are (i.e. the kind of people who pick their kid's name using a computer algorithm), we believe that Grant's horrible sleeping pattern is just a problem that can be solved with the right data, experimentation and rigorous evaluation.

We've read just about every baby sleep book printed (we even researched which books to read), and cross-correlated the findings. We've asked every parent we know, and even some we don't know, for their sleep training experiences, and we've scoured the online mommy forums to see if we need to let our LO CIO in order to STTN.

We've tracked his sleeping and eating patterns in elaborate spreadsheets like this one:


And we've created color-coded charts to spot trends:


We've made notes of every sleep occurrence. Was he swaddled or unswaddled? Did he fall asleep with the pacifier? Were the curtains drawn? Was the white noise machine on? Was he wearing his Mickey Mouse pajamas or the striped onesie? Did Mommy eat cottage cheese that day? Did Daddy go to the gym that night? Once - and I am not making this up - I even cross-referenced his sleep habits with the weather to see if he slept better on overcast days, cold days, etc.

We've had numerous hypotheses (if we leave the light on, he'll sleep longer) only to have them fail in experimentation (okay, he likes the dark). We've mentally invented all sorts of baby sleep contraptions that may or may not pass muster with the local child welfare agency.

And in all of our research, what have we determined?

Nothing.

The kid is a complete mystery. Why does he sleep one night for seven hours straight and then wake every hour the next night? Who knows. It's probably the same random reason why he'll wake up when the toilet flushes but not when they're doing construction right outside his window.

I guess we just need more data...

Grant, in a rare moment of slumber: