Getting Baby to Sleep in a House Full of Kids

Babies and kids getting enough sleep is one of the most important things to me.  It's right up there with teaching them to love Jesus and to read.  Seriously.

My husband has (lovingly... of course) referred to me as the Sleep Nazi, more than once.

He has also come home to find me in tears because "the kids woke the baby up all day", also more than once.

And I'm not just talking about when I was a young mom, with lots of tiny kids.  It's still a big deal to me.  As you might expect, this is one of those things that has turned out to be infinitely more difficult this time around, since my house is now full of loud, busy teenagers, "tweens" and big kids, instead of being full of small kids who can all be expected to take a nap.

Once, a long time ago, I was talking to a friend and mentioned that my three kids (then aged 1, 3 and 4) all took their afternoon nap at the same time.  She said, "Wow, that's lucky."  I agreed, but what I really thought was, "Lucky?!?  Are you kidding me??  You think it's luck that gets three kids to nap on the same schedule?  It's hard work, is what it is!"

It was hard work then, and it's hard work now.

Things have changed.  We aren't a family of little kids anymore.  We are a family of big kids AND we also have a baby.  Instead of keeping the baby up later than everyone else, and sneaking the 3 year old out of their shared bedroom as quietly as possible so as to keep the 4 year old asleep longer, it is now a matter of looking at everyone else's schedules, and figuring out how this fat baby of mine is going to get his naps in.

It's also a matter of hissing through my teeth at the boys who are tearing through the house brandishing nerf guns shouting at the top of their lungs... but I digress.

During the last school year, we had two schedules.   The weekday/school-day schedule, which went something like this (all times are approximate, and subject to a baby's fickle whims):

7am - Baby Boy wakes up in the middle of the getting-ready-for-school craziness
9am-11am - two hour nap - in a silent house, since the kids were gone
1 pm - one hour nap - always conveniently timed for just exactly when I needed to grab my kindergartner off the bus...
3:30pm - 5 pm - somewhere in here Baby Boy fits one more 45 minute nap in, depending on our afternoon schedule for the day.

And the weekend schedule:

Saturday mornings I usually managed to get him some kind of morning nap, but for the rest of the weekend, all bets were off.  This poor baby fell asleep in our arms at church, in the car during errands, and anywhere else he could grab a quick nap, since we were anywhere and everywhere all weekend long.  Even if I managed to get him down at home during a regular naptime, he was invariably woken by some  rambunctious horseplay, or loud arguing, from one or more of his siblings.

Once school ended, I was faced with the task of making sure that the entire summer didn't look like our weekends did.  That kid would be a mess, and I'd be an even bigger one.

It took a little while to adjust expectations - both mine and my kids' - but this was our schedule for our summer days:

7:30am - Since there wasn't a flurry of alarm clocks, lunch-making, bus-catching going on every morning, it was a little quieter around here, and Baby Boy could sleep in a little later.
9:30am-11:30am - Nap time.  This is when I sent my kids out for their daily runs, and encourage them to work on their Summer Goals, or to read or do something else quiet for awhile.

Because I know that it isn't reasonable, or healthy for anyone, to expect my kids to be silent every time Baby's asleep (although that is, in my heart of hearts, what I really want to do), but if we can keep it down just a little, Baby Boy will take a whole two-hour nap, and then our afternoon could be spent doing something fun: going to the  beach, or the park, or go do something else fun.  If we mess up the big morning nap, Baby's not so much fun to drag around later, since he's tired and just wants to sleep, but can't... you know the drill.

It would be nice if the big nap was during the crazy-hot part of the afternoon; it'd be nice to be stuck at home then instead of the relative cool of the morning.  But it's not.  So we work with what we've got.  And what we usually had is a quiet morning, followed by a fun afternoon.  Not so bad, right?

Today begins our new school year.  All my kids are in school full days, although they do each have a different start and end time from one another (can I tell you how THANKFUL I am for the school bus??).  I'm expecting my days to go back to something like our previous school day schedule, but we'll see.

Kate


P.S. One more thing.  I think it goes without saying, but just in case there are brand-new moms who don't already know this: If you always provide a quiet house for you baby to sleep in, they will always need a quiet house to sleep in.  Allowing your baby to sleep through a little noise is a good thing.  I just happen to have an entire basketball team parading around my house all day, so when I say we "quiet down" for a bit, what I mean to say is we take the volume down from the level of Normandy Beach to somewhere around the decibel of an elementary school field trip.

Sweet Dreams!