A has always been a fantastic baby and a great sleeper! I know all mothers say that about their child but A slept through the night almost from her first week of life. Other than random times when she was going through a growth spurt, N and I were able to get an around 8 straight hours of sleep. Delicious uninterrupted sleep.

N has always been a bad sleeper. He needs there to be no light, noise or other disturbance. He usually sleeps with a pillow over his head to block out all possible stimuli even in a dark and quiet room. Usually N gets very little sleep. He is an early riser and wakes at any noise.

I had childhood insomnia. From age 3 on I would be up until the wee hours. My parents tell many tales about going to bed and hearing me patter around the house. After years of trying all kinds of sleep medication to help me sleep well, with minimal success. I was used to an extremely erratic sleep pattern.

After traveling to Israel for the first time when I was 14, my sleep changed dramatically. All of a sudden I was able to sleep in any situation. Lights on, no problem. People screaming in the next room, no big. I could sleep through anything.

After getting used to my new sleep pattern, I developed a system. I needed 2 or 3 alarms (super loud and annoying alarms) to go off starting almost an hour before I actually had to get up. As I got older and entered the workforce, I got used to having multiple alarms, with short snoozes between before getting up.

N’s first experience with this was the day after our wedding. We had gone to a really nice hotel for our wedding night and the next morning, bright an early, my alarm went off. N’s reaction was to jump up and start exclaiming about the air raid signal going off. I quickly turned it off and apologized for forgetting to turn it off the night before. He loves to tell this story to illustrate how hard it is for me to get up and how crazy he finds it.

So basically, N is a morning person, and I am a night owl.

I had been very nervous about the baby and waking up with her as I am such a deep sleeper and didn’t want N to always get up when she did. Which is why we were both so grateful to have a baby that slept through the night with such ease.

Bottom line, we were spoiled. Our sweet baby girl spoiled us. We came to expect the nice long nights of sleep. So now, we have a problem. For the past week, A has been waking a couple of time a night. At first, we though it was just a growth spurt. But those came and went, and this is lingering.

Another problem is that feeding A several times during the night results in thirsty, hungry and tired mommy. Which makes it hard to get up and head to work…

I don’t think it’s a sleep training issue as we put A to sleep after a nice bedtime ritual, consisting of N singing to her, us putting her in PJs, reading her a story, feeding her, and putting her down awake. A usually goes straight to sleep. Sometimes she cries for a few minutes as she wants to keep playing, but even then, after a few minutes, she is down for the night.

Instead, I think the problem is that A is hungry. And that is what is waking her, and causing her to wake us. So we need to start giving her more dinner, or more accurately, we need to give her more filling food for dinner. She can’t always eat what we do, not yet. But she is pretty good with grown up food.

Usually though, she only wants a little dinner. She wants to eat her puffs and will turn her nose up or more accurately refuse to take bites of the chicken, vegetables, rice, yogurt, cheese or other food items we offer her for dinner. So I think we need a different approach.

So here is hoping that better dinners equals better sleep!!