Naps and Sleeping when Traveling with Baby

As you may remember from this post, we have a wedding to go to the first weekend of August and we're bringing Pierce with us. My last post discussed how we were dealing with food and this post I'll talk about naps and sleeping.

For the past little while, Pierce's sleep schedule has been messed up. I don't know why, but his usual schedule is as follows:
Wake-up: 7:30am
First nap: 9:00am - 10:30am
Second nap: 1:00pm - 3:00pm
Bedtime: 8:00pm
I'm hoping I can get him back on this schedule before we go to the wedding.

When we put him to sleep, we use music we have on a CD as well as on the laptop. This is convenient because we can play the same music for him in the car as well as at home.

The wedding is in Quebec, which is the next province to the East of us and it will take us about 5.5 hours of non-stop driving for us to get to our hotel in the city where the wedding is taking place. The wedding starts at 5pm, and we'll need to stop for lunch as well as time to get ready at the hotel. I'm planning on having us leave the house at 8:30 so that we can get on the road (and stop for breakfast, of course!) in time for Pierce to have his first nap of the day. We'll play his sleep music in the car during this time and when he wakes up at his usual time (fingers crossed!) we'll play fast paced music to keep him awake until noon when we stop for lunch. Maybe I'll sit in the back with him, too and play with him a bit so he doesn't get bored. After lunch we'll get back in the car with Pierce's sleep music playing so that he can have his second nap. I don't really have any doubt that this will work for us because it's worked before. This plan will hopefully get us to the hotel by 3:30, which will give us each enough time to get ready for the wedding as well as a few stops along the way for breastfeeding and diaper changes.

What I am worried about, however, is night time sleeping. When I booked the hotel reservation, they asked me if I wanted a crib and I said no because we're planning on bringing his Pack & Play with us for him to sleep in. I wasn't worried about this until recently when I tried to put him in the playpen at my parent's house and he woke up while I was putting him down. (It's a long way down and I can't keep him close to my body the way I can when I put him in his crib at home.) I'm trying to decide if I should call the hotel and tell them I've changed my mind about the crib. Maybe I should put Pierce in his playpen at home when he goes to sleep so that he gets used to it? The thought of putting my child in a crib used by many other children grosses me out a bit. I mean, I know they wash the sheets, but what about the rails of the crib? Kids put those in their mouths all the time, and really, I don't have any way of knowing how clean it is. Also, if we were to go with the hotel crib, I'd bring my own sheet for it. I just like to know that things that Pierce uses are clean and safe. I am far less concerned with cleanliness when it comes to me than I am with Pierce if that makes you think I'm less crazy.

I really hope he sleeps well at the hotel. I don't do well on little sleep. I get frustrated very easily. But I'm hoping that, at least if he doesn't sleep well during the night, he'll make up for it in the car on the way home the next day.

My morning coffee tastes better at 5:30 than at 7:30

I never knew that until this morning.

Up until just recently (as in, three days ago) Pierce has been swaddled to sleep. Yes, I swaddled my son until he was 8 months old. With pride. Okay, less with pride and more out of pure fear. He slept so well that I was afraid to mess with anything lest he turn into one of those babies that never sleeps and has his Momma walking into walls with exhaustion.

I agonized over how to rid him of the swaddle. Should we just go cold turkey? Wean him off of it? I was leaning more towards weaning, but that meant that it would be longer when he was finally sleeping without the swaddle, and I really wanted him to be able to sleep without us needing to bring the swaddling blankets with us if we were going to be out somewhere with him past bedtime. And I really didn't want to hear any more Judgey McJudgerson comments about the swaddle.

After months of doing nothing because I couldn't decide whether or not to go cold turkey, I decided to just take the plunge. Yes, I was scared, but he needed to learn to sleep without the swaddle at some point, and really he seemed to not want to be swaddled anymore when we went to put him to bed. I knew that he'd eventually learn to sleep and I wouldn't be so sleep deprived I couldn't function.

It's actually been going pretty well. I can't really complain. He doesn't sleep through the night, but he doesn't usually wake up too much, either. Last night he woke up a lot. The worst part of him waking up without being swaddled is that he's so much more difficult to get back to sleep. He has spent a lot of time sleeping in our bed with us when we can't get him to go to sleep. The first two days when he made it into our bed I just left him there, but last night when I woke up and he was fast asleep, I was able to successfully transfer him to his crib.

Despite the 5:30 wake-up calls this is going a lot better than I thought it would, so I'm happy, albeit a little tired!