Eight full hours of sleep!

Wow, this has been an absolutely wonderful week. For five of the past six nights, Adelaida has slept soundly through the night. She's slept long enough for us to put her to bed, get ready for bed ourselves, fall asleep, and wake up the next morning (either by Dale's alarm clock or just because we were no longer tired). She's been sleeping for at least eight hours each night, and slept for eleven hours last night, although she was wide awake and looking around her room when I went to get her this morning.


My sleeping-through-the-night theory is that Adelaida is suddenly sleeping through the night because she has learned to suck her thumb. Now, when she wakes up in the middle of the night, she can suck on her thumb to soothe herself and never starts crying. Adelaida spent last weekend learning how to connect her mouth with her hands and every activity we tried to get her interested in (tummy time, laying on her turtle mat and batting at her toys, sitting in her bouncy chair) quickly turned into practicing sucking her thumb. She got pretty good at it last weekend and has continued to improve over the past week, although her hand still misses her mouth pretty frequently and sometimes it takes a few minutes for her to get started. She generally sucks her left thumb, although she's not too picky and if her right thumb ends up in her mouth first, she sucks it instead.

I was hesitant to rejoice when she slept through the night the first time, but now it seems to have become the norm and Dale and I are once again getting plenty of sleep!