Sleep and iBaby

So, we've been doing sleep training the past couple of weeks, and the work is paying off! Lily slept 7.5 hours straight last night, woke up to eat, and went back to sleep for another 2 hours until 7:30. We have reached our goal of sleeping through the night by 12 weeks since a 5 hour stretch is considered sleeping through the night. It will take a couple more weeks, but we will get there to where night sleep is consistently a 6-7 hour stretch (she is currently sleeping 6 hours for her longest stretch, followed by another 3)...at least until the 4 month growth spurt, but I'm prepared for that! After this expected growth spurt, we will start working on the 7-7ish schedule and a regularized nap schedule. I know that because we exclusively breastfeed and will not introduce solids of any sort until she is a bare minimum of 7 months (maybe later), she may still need one middle of the night feeding which is fine. Babies physiologically aren't able to organize their nap schedules until 4-5 months of age, and that age is from their expected due date, not their actual date of birth. Currently she takes 45 minute to 1 hour naps several times a day and is never awake for longer than two hours. 90 minutes is her optimal awake time, and I usually start putting her down to sleep around the 90 minute awake mark and she goes to sleep quite happily. As long as she gets her minimum of 16 hours of sleep per day, I'm satisfied. For those wondering, yep - we let her cry it out at night for up to a certain length of time instead of picking her up. She sleeps right next to me in her Arm's Reach Co-Sleeper, so it's a mere matter of opening one eye to see if she's okay. Obviously, her "hungry" cry sounds completely different than her other ones, and I attend to her right away if I hear that one. I pretty much know exactly what she needs from the way she sounds. I have zero issues with the "cry it out" approach, and really can't understand parents who "just can't handle" listening to their baby cry. Honestly, babies cry longer in the car sometimes...if you pulled over every single time, you'd never get to your destination! I honestly feel bad for those parents...as a result of not willing to be tough with their kids, life is much harder than it needs to be.

I also wanted to recommend an application for Android/iPhone users who want to be able to keep track of their baby's sleep, diapers, feedings, etc. iBaby is what I use, and it's extremely helpful. It lets me know the cumulative length of sleep, nursing, etc over the past 24 hours and I don't have to try and remember which side I nursed on last or how long Lily has been awake. It was a free app, so I decided to try it out, and I absolutely love it. It's so much easier to track Lily's sleep/nursing patterns this way and I always have my phone with me. I found it interesting that yesterday I spent a total of 5 hours nursing! So, if you're a mom who has an iPhone or Android and wants to be able to track this stuff, give it a try. :)