Up All Night?
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Monday, June 08, 2009 1:00 PM
I have a 4.5-month-old baby, and it’s been twenty weeks since I slept more than three hours in a row.
Not that I have any expectations in this area, you understand. As I’ve mentioned before, my daughter didn’t sleep through the night until she was almost two.
Blaise does seem to enjoy sleeping more than Camilla did, and he’s already managed to do a couple five-hour stretches of sleep in his short life; his sister never slept five hours in a row before ten months old. But as a general rule Blaise wakes up every two to three hours during the night, and I’m okay with that pattern continuing for quite a while.
Because of my own experience and the experiences my friends have reported, it seems normal to me that a baby needs to wake up in the night, for comfort or feeding or both, during his first year. We do know a couple families whose children have slept through the night at three or four months old, but the rest of us have dealt with sleep struggles through the first year and often beyond.
Which is why I was surprised to come across the results of this poll at Babycenter: When did your baby start sleeping through the night?
I don’t regularly visit Babycenter; I actually stumbled across this poll while Googling for information about sunscreen. But now I’m wondering if I’ve made a mistake in not being a Babycenter subscriber, because it appears the parents over there have some tricks I don’t have!
I was amazed to see that, with more than 30,000 votes tallied, 90% of parents reported that their babies were sleeping five hours straight on a regular basis by 3 months of age. 72% said their babies were regularly doing EIGHT hours straight by then.
Blaise is our “good” sleeper, and he’s nowhere near that. Bryan and I are cautiously optimistic that he might start sleeping through the night before he’s a year old, and this prospect is very exciting to us. But according to this poll, that would not be impressive at all.
So are we just unlucky? Are my friends unlucky too? Are the people voting at Babycenter exaggerating their babies’ sleep skills?
How have your babies slept? I’m curious to know what the baby-sleep averages are here among our Faith & Family readers!
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