Day 22: The new 10-day plan

Once again I haven't managed to formally set down the plan until today, but I've been more or less implementing the points below for the last couple of days.

The last plan stays in place, with the following changes:

1.  I will start the naptime routine 45 minutes, not 30 minutes, before I want Mari to sleep. While in some ways this is a step backwards, since the ideal would be a shorter naptime routine, the fact is that Mari often takes a long time to fall asleep, and if I'm to have a hope of keeping her on schedule, I need more time. If, however, Mari shows signs of tiredness before I start the naptime routine, I will skip the story and song -- I will just feed her (if she hasn't eaten recently), take her to the potty and put her to bed.

2.  If she doesn't use the potty within a minute or two during bedtime and naptime routines, I'll just diaper her and get on with it -- no more 15-minute potty trips that include a lot of getting her on and off the potty, no matter how convinced I am that she really should need to go.

3.  I will try harder to get her to fall asleep without being rocked to sleep. I will rock her until she's calm and is putting her head down on my chest but before she has started to close her eyes, I'll put her down and pat her, give her her lovey, verbally soothe her and stay by her side but I won't pick her up until she has been in her crib 20 minutes without falling asleep OR until her fussing turns into full-on crying. If she hasn't fallen asleep after 20 minutes, or if she starts to cry, I will do what I was doing in the previous 10-day plan (i.e. pick up and rock until nearly asleep).

4.  In part to adjust for the above, I will try again to move the beginning of the bedtime routine to 6:30, with the goal of having her asleep by 7:30. Too often lately I have had to skip the bath because she was already getting fussy.

5.  I will read the No-Cry Nap Solution (which I just got today) and make a plan to try to improve Mari's napping habits, since she currently wakes up very quickly and has to be held if I'm going to get her back to sleep, often for the rest of the nap.

6.  I will try harder to stick to the schedule.

7.  I will continue to keep track of her nap lengths and night wakings, and I will also start keeping track of how long she's up between naps, in hopes of establishing optimal times once I have a bit more data.

8.  I will eliminate the before-I-go-to-bed dream feed, because I don't want to interfere with her sleep cycles, even if it means I have to get up sooner to feed her. I will avoid feeding her until five hours have passed after she went to bed. After the five-hour no-feeding stretch, I will feed her up to every three hours if she won't fall back asleep without nursing.

9.  I will now let Mari fuss for up to 10 minutes before I go in, not five minutes. This is for fussy noises only. If at any point she starts to full-on cry, I will go in immediately.

Today: Another day of unpredictability, coupled with a little culpability. Mari's morning nap was unusually long at 2.5 hours. I then took her to the library but didn't leave as soon as she got up because I thought she'd be hungry and didn't want her to start screaming while we were walking. So we ended up being out longer than we should have and she fell asleep in her carrier on the way home. I was going to let her continue to sleep in her carrier, but she woke up as soon as we got home, maybe due to the change in temperature or because I wasn't walking anymore. So that nap only lasted 20 minutes. She woke up twice during her early-evening nap and ended up having to be held until she'd slept for an hour. Then she got cranky again very quickly so I had to skip the bath and massage and get her straight to sleep.