And thanks to the rest of you who posted your experiences (but by all means don’t let that stop the rest of you who haven’t posted yet!). Little Henry Torgo actually had his longest stretch of uninterrupted overnight sleep last night; 4 1/2 hours, from 2:30 to 7am! Woo hoo! I can’t explain how excited I was when I woke to his grunts and saw the clock reading 7:00. I could have fallen to my knees exulting in thanks to the baby gods for giving me more than 2 hours of sleep in a row.
Young Whatsit Jr. started sleeping a five-hour stretch around the time he was four months old. Then when he was five months, he started “sleeping through the night”: he’d conk out sometime around 10 or 11 PM and sleep through until 8 AM, with maybe one or two night wakings to be fed. This is still his pattern at the age of 7 months, although the two-waking nights are becoming more rare.
#1 son was wierd. He’d go to sleep at 10, wake up at 2:30, require a change and refill, and he’d be fine until 8am. This went on for quite a bit. I forget exact times.
Child #2 (daughter) caught on faster. Same 2:30 feeding schedule for the first few months though.
My kids, however, got used to hearing Public Radio’s Classical Music, Blues, My Def Leppard collection and whatever else was near the radio for background noise.
Neither liked cereal, rice or anything until 8 months, then I had to get them their own plates at ryan’s.
No healthy person really stays asleep for the whole night. But most of us awake only briefly and, assuming nothing is wrong, go back to sleep so quickly we don’t remember waking up.
When we say that a baby has started to “sleep through the night”, it means that he doesn’t need parental help (feeding, soothing, or whatever) to fall back to sleep after these normal wakings.
