A Tale of Two Nights

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...and is a great success story (so far).

Friday night, the girls slept okay, and as usual (lately) Abby woke us up around 7 on Saturday.  Breakfast time!  We did our usual eat-play-nap cycle (with a walk thrown in during the playtime, which Merry especially loved).  At about the normal time, we fed the girls again ("elevensies") and then had a play period again.  But, instead of going down for a nap at the usual time (12:30/1:00), we put the girls in the car and went to the NICU reunion.  So, end result, the girls missed their second nap and never took their third (optional-yet-not-really-optional) nap.

I knew we were in for a rough night when Abby woke up about an hour after going to bed, and then again about 90 minutes later (it was rough enough, anyway - I was watching OU go up in flames against K-State, at home).  And, for the rest of Saturday night, Abby proceeded to cry approximately every 90-120 minutes.  Good times, indeed.  Both Matt and I, however, resisted the temptation to get up and give her a pacifier, and she usually would stop crying after about five-ish minutes (but was definitely successful in waking us up each time).  The best (ha) part of this is every time I woke up, I thought about all of the what ifs....was her diaper dirty...was she hungry...was she teething...etc.  But, as Matt and I discussed the next morning, it was pretty obvious she was crying because she was overtired.

So, Sunday, as usual, we fed the girls around 7, played and then went for a walk with Papaw, and then put them down to nap.  I was encouraged that the morning nap lasted almost two hours!  We had our next feed-play cycle, and then put them down to nap again around 12:45ish.  This nap lasted over two hours!  Wooohoo!  The girls got in a short third nap, Hazel got super hungry early (and let us know about it), and so we put them down for bed about 30 minutes earlier than the previous night.   AND....aside from a small peep from Hazel at one point, both girls slept ALL night long.  In fact, in an ironic twist, we had to wake up Abby for breakfast this morning!

So, obviously this is a small sample size, but it really is true...the better sleep the girls get during the day, the better they sleep at night.  The sleep books are right!