On the whole it hasn’t been a great sleep week. Trixie either has allergies or maybe a mild cold and it seems to have affected her sleep. Everything came to a head yesterday morning:

Wakes up: 6:10 am. (too damn early)
My thoughts: Well, at least she’ll take a good nap.

Afternoon nap: 1 hour 23 minutes (too short by 40-60 minutes)
My thoughts: Well, at least she’ll go to bed early.

Won’t go to sleep until: 10:10 pm (the latest she has ever stayed up. Also the longest she has ever been awake for one day: 14 hours, 36 minutes)
My thoughts: Well, at least she’ll sleep-in in the morning.

Wakes up: 5:51 am (the shortest overnight sleep in more than a year: 7 hours, 41 minutes)
My thoughts: I’m going to sell her.

Earlier today Trixie took her nap without falling off the bed, but it took me 90 minutes to get her to go to sleep. It was a nightmare, and makes me want to take up cat herding.

Now we’re getting ready to see if Trixie has learned anything since last night. Anyone want to take a guess? We’re resetting the poll. Place your bets for tonight’s [Monday night] record. I’ll post the answer first thing Tuesday morning. Well… maybe after coffee.

[Editor's note] This poll is now closed.

No falls. She’s a learning machine: 5
1, maybe: 19
2 at most: 16
3 or more: 8
She’s a learning machine — she’ll sleep on the floor: 17

Since we can no longer secure her in the “toddler bed”, we had to fall back to the next defensible position. We bought a door gate last night and have cordoned off her room. This line must hold. It also means that we have conceded that territory. She could spend hours exploring in there in the middle of night (if done quietly) and we’d never know. So, we finally had to baby-proof the room.

Now, I’ve told Jenn for 17 months that I would baby-proof the house, but I never really intended to because it just seemed like a lot of work. I’ve opted instead to actually watch the kid and intervene only when she tries to pry open the bleach with a kitchen knife. However, now that Trixie really, really has her own room, we went through and plugged the outlets, secured the electrical cords, installed toilet seat clamps on everything. You know, the works.

Tonight is her first night sleeping in there. Getting her to go to bed took a little extra work, but after hanging on the gate and howling for fifteen minutes she eventually wandered back over to the bed and crawled in. I was thankful when she finally fell asleep. It’s a little disconcerting to have her creeping around the room in the dark, knocking things over and running into stuff. It sounds too much like something is loose in there, just waiting for the rest of us to go asleep.

Our plan was to begin the trip at bedtime, let Trixie fall asleep on the way up, and then carefully move her — still asleep — once we arrived around midnight. Trixie’s plan was to grab a short nap on the trip up, and then have us carefully move her — wide awake — once we arrived. She then proceeded to stay up until 2am.

As for the sleeping arrangements, Trixie slept (screamed) in the Pack ‘N Play portable crib during this trip. It wasn’t ideal, but it’s really the only solution because it just doesn’t work to bring Trixie into our bed. She is a kicker. She’ll also try to peel your eyelids or ears right off your face. In short, letting Trixie in our bed is dangerous, and it only happens when we make bad decisions in the middle of the night.

So for the duration of the trip, Trixie didn’t sleep that well overnight and she refused to take a nap during the day. The only time she actually fell asleep was from sheer exhaustion, and by the time we got to this point she was stumbling around, bumping into things, babbling incoherently, grinding her fists into her eyes and generally acting like she was drunk.

I also think Trixie was getting stressed out from waking up in a new place every time she fell asleep. She falls asleep in the car, wakes up in a strange apartment. Falls asleep in front of the Capital, wakes up in a coffee shop. By Monday she was struggling to keep her eyes open out of fear of where she might end up next. I know I would be a little freaked out. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode for toddlers.

Despite sleep challenges, we had a great trip and I’m ready to hit the road again. Trixie, however, is still catching up on her sleep.

Oh yeah, the title? Trixie Standard Time, of course.

Her daytime nap schedule is still surprisingly irregular. On the positive side, her many daily catnaps have slowly consolidated into only two naps a day. But unfortunately, despite our best efforts, those daytime naps can vary wildly from day to day depending on her mood. It’s something we’re still working on.

For me, displaying 8 months worth of sleep data is an interesting challenge. The information is always available to anyone in the Sleep Log, but the full chart takes up almost a dozen screens on my browser. It’s good for looking at small ranges of time — not the big picture. Fortunately we can compress the data in such a way that makes it easier to look at patterns. Here are a couple of charts that cover the last eight months:

So, my question is, is there any way to get them to stop screaming when they just wake up? I guess first I should ask whether it’s something that all babies do, or if it’s only Trixie.

No matter what time of day she wakes up, whether it’s after a good night’s sleep or just a 38-minute nap, Trixie is vertical and hollering within seconds of waking.

I’ve watched her wake up before. When it’s close to the end of her nap, I’ll peek in from behind the door. She’ll usually be peacefully sprawled out. Then without warning, she’ll twitch a little and suddenly flip herself over and urgently begin to pull up on the crib bars — all in one move. Picture someone in a cage being lowered into a pool of water. That’s the sort of desperate struggling, yelling and clawing up the side of the crib I’m talking about.

The panic stops the instant one of us goes to pick her up, so it’s not something I’m concerned about. Besides, the quirky wake state could simply be a genetic trait she got from her mother. Jenn tends to wake up rather ‘alert’. I once slept through a tornado that removed the roof from my house.

Otherwise, I figure Trixie’s either having bad dreams right before she wakes up or she’s naturally suited to join one of those fringe conspiracy groups where sleeping with your boots on and waking up in a state of emergency is encouraged. All I know is that when the revolution comes, she’ll be ready.

The Sleep Probability chart is simply an average of Trixie’s daily Sleep Maps for a given set of days. The averages are translated to a gray-scale spectrum. The stronger the contrast, and the larger the pattern, the more predictable her sleep habits for the time period examined. It’s designed to collapse a range of time into 10-minute increments on a 24 hour scale in order to figure out if there are any patterns developing.

The probability of Trixie being asleep at a particular time of day for the given range of days is expressed as a gray-scale value. Solid black represents a 100% probability that she was asleep. Solid white means a 100% probability that she was awake. The gray areas represent different degrees of uncertainty regarding her sleep schedule. 50% gray indicates a complete lack of schedule. It means there was an equal (or completely random) chance of her being awake or asleep.

What kind of predictive value do these Probability Spectrums have? Unfortunately not as much as I’d I hoped – or at least I haven’t figured out a way to apply them yet. But they are great for looking back at her progress over the past five months. Of course, when you start at the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.

For an explanation of these images please see:
Sleep Cartography and
The Good, the Bad and the In-between