Tracking my baby's sleep

I’m going to talk about a personal project. My name’s Yasmin Lucero. I’m a mathematical biologist and statistician, but I’m going to talk about what I spent most of my time this year doing, my big project.

This is my daughter Elle. We’ve been keeping detailed records of all her behaviour. So the first thing I’d like to do is to thank the people who really collected a lot of this data, was the nanny Tori and my husband of course. And I’m just going to show you some of this data that we collected. It was all pencil and paper collecting and I’ll show you a bunch of plots like this one which is a time series throughout her life.

This is the number of feedings per day. So you see when she was born 10, 11, 12 feedings; not uncommon. It’s settled down now to about six feedings a day, so that’s sort of a nice natural evolution.

We had to do this all with pencil and paper log and I digitized it and put it into an Excel file and I’ve got a whole bunch of time series plots like this one that I’m going to show.

So this is the number of bottle feeds, and when I was doing a lot of feedings I would sometimes sleep through a feeding, so my husband would give her bottle. So you see when this starts out we’d give her several bottles a day and this drops down to zero while here number of feedings settled down.

This is the for a while how long the breast feedings were taking and in the early days it could be for 40 minutes for breast feedings. So you’re very eager as a mom to see that drop off, and once that dropped down to a reasonable efficient numbers of minutes and then I stopped tracking it.

And this is the number of solid feedings per day. As she got past six months we started her solid food. And as you see the breast feeding kind of tails off, where the number of solid foods were introduced in and I think I have an image here of the two together, so you can kind of see as one pattern kind of drops off to a steady state, and then we’d bring in the newest type of feeding and especially at the beginning the solid feeding takes a long time because she really doesn’t know how to do it.

This is total number of sleep, and the most thing to note about it is that it’s remarkably constant from day to day. She really 14 and a half hours sleep and it dropped off somewhere around six or seven months of age at maybe like 14 hours per day. But with all the stuff that goes on, you really don’t feel that she is sleeping the exact same amount day after day but there’s actually a lot of consistency in what she actually did. Which was surprising, one of the things we learned from this data.

Now I’m going to show you some night time sleep and some day time sleep. So here’s the day time sleep. This is from 6A.M. to 6P.M. each day. And early on she spent a lot of the day napping. And infact at the beginning they don’t tell the difference between day and night very well. But now she’s more normal. She sleeps mostly at night.

So what have we got next? I think there’s the number of naps and the longest nap. They’re all a little long and a little short at the same time. This is the number of naps and you see some of them early on there’s seven or eight naps and that’s when she’s a tiny little baby, and now she’s pretty much consolidated down to three naps and you’ll see that she drops down to doing two naps and eventually there will just be one nap.

This is the longest nap and this is not supposed to happen. It’s supposed to go the other way, but my baby, she is very wakeful and you’re supposed to get longer naps, but for her she’s basically doing all her sleeping at night now and even the naps that she’s taking are shorter and shorter.

This is night sleep and as she has consolidated her sleep into the night she sleeps less and less during the day and she’s sort of stabilized a sort of nice steady nighttime pattern. Basically 6:30P.M to unfortunately 5:30A.M is her rather consistent schedule. We tried lots of things to try and like change that schedule but she’s really convinced that 5:30 is a good time to get up.

Lots of variation in here, and this is the most important variable and this is the last thing I’m going to show you. This is the longest sleep period in a row. So this is important as you can imagine because this is also means the longest sleep that I get to do.

So in the beginning for a good three to five months I didn’t get to sleep for more than three hours at a time because she wasn’t sleeping for more than three hours at a time. And then at a certain point she finally sort of crossed the threshold and I would note she crossed it a few months later than your average baby. And now we’re getting much more civilized. Average longest sleep periods of five or six hours in a row and even occasionally 10 or 11 hours which is basically the entire night she sleeps right through from 6:30 to 5:30. But that doesn’t happen very often, even still.

And this is the most important graph, but I don’t have any more time to tell you about is. So all of this stuff is up on our pup, so you’re more than welcome and I’ll also add to it and this is all very new and that’s what I’ve got.

Thank you.