Day 5: Ch-ch-ch changes

It's clear some aspects of my sleep plan aren't working out.

For one, I can't breastfeed every two hours. I used to be able to, when Mari was younger, but now she's eating more at once and isn't hungry as often, and when she's not hungry, she rejects the boob. All that's good in general, but not when I'm trying to get her to eat more during the day so she doesn't need as much at night. It's still not clear to me just how much Mari really needs to eat at night. She does seem legitimately hungry sometimes, but other times, even now that I've been stretching out how often I'll put her to the boob, she barely nips.

Also, I don't think Mari can really take three 90-minute naps. It's a battle getting her to stay napping for more than 20 minutes sometimes. I can persevere to a point, but sometimes she's obviously up and energetic and no amount of rocking will put her back to sleep. So I will now be trying to get her to nap for 90 minutes in the morning and late afternoon, but will allow her early afternoon one to be shorter -- that one's been the shortest for a long time. I'll still try to get her to nap at least 3.5 hours in total, 4 if I can manage it.

Finally, I think we need to be stricter about her naptimes, to try to get her onto a more consistent schedule, much as she resists being scheduled. It takes her quite awhile to settle down into sleep, so I need to start a naptime routine half an hour before I want her actually sleeping. That's only an hour and a half of active awake time between naps. So her ideal day should now look like:

7:30ish - up and play
9:00 - Naptime routine: breastfeed boob 1, story, song, breastfeed boob 2 (she likes a break between boobs), rock and shh
9:30 - Nap
11:00 - Play
12:30 - Naptime routine
1:00 - Nap
2:00 - Play
3:30 - Naptime routine
4:00 - Nap
5:30 - Play
6:30 - Bedtime routine: Bath, massage, breastfeed boob 1, two stories, lights out and sound machine on, lullaby, breastfeed boob 2, rock and shh
7:30 - Sleep

Today: It was a rough start to the evening. Mari went down okay by 7:45, but by 8 PM, she was up again. I tried repeatedly to soothe her just enough to get her drowsy and put her down still awake. Several times, she seemed to go to sleep, only to start fussing again minutes later. Finally she started all-out crying. She seemingly didn't want to be rocked, jiggled, nursed or put down -- nothing worked for the longest time. Finally I gave up (for now) on trying to put her in her crib still barely awake, and finally she allowed me to rock her to sleep. It took an hour, and she was up again within less than another hour. Argh!