Sleep and feeding pattens from birth to two months

At the hospital they give you a piece of paper where you track feedings and diapers. When when got to the end of the paper, we decided to make the move over to Trixie Tracker.

We had used the online tracking for Logan starting around one month to six months. We found that experience interesting and we were interested in doing some comparisons.

Birth to 1 Month old

We only have data on this for Kalia. Her sleep patterns were actually really good for a newborn --I truly believe this is from following the Baby Whisper advice early.

In addition to putting her down when she is "sleepy but awake" and using a noise machine in her room, I really feel that the day time feeding is key to starting them sleeping better. I started feeding Kalia as much as she wanted to eat at regular times during the day: 7:30am, 11:30am, 3:30am and 7:30am. Given she is a new born I would give her extra feedings if she needed it and was flexible with these times by an hour either way. The first two weeks I was also breast feeding, which is not shown on these charts.

I'll use red to highlight the scheduled feedings. Once her day time feeding gets predictable and you get into a routine, the night time sleep/feedings start to fall into place too.

1 month to 2 months old

Here is where we can compare things between Logan and Kalia. Both are getting pretty much the same amount of sleep but the structure of that sleep is very different! Here is Logan's sleep chart at one month:

And here is Kalia's:
Clearly a huge difference! And if you look at their feeding charts you can see why.

I didn't put Logan on a feeding schedule until he was almost two months old:

And here is Kalia's at one month. At this point I could be pretty sure that I would have from 8pm to midnight free to "me time" and sleep! She would also likely wake up twice to feed after midnight. If I see that she is finishing her bottle each time, then I increase the amount I make future bottles. She can eat as much as she wants and I let her tell me when she has had enough. This routine is great for sleep and for planning our day --I know pretty accurately when she is going to start getting hungry and I can plan outings and packing of bags around this. I believe it's also the reason why she cries less; I know if she's fussing that I can rule out being hungry based on the time and attend to her other needs better.

Kalia is now into her second month and only waking up once a night for bottle. I'm also laying the work to correct an issue we had with Logan --no soother at night so I don't have to keep popping it back into his mouth all night.