One Month of Sleepy Nights

Nora is one month old, so it's time for an incredibly wonky post without any pictures, but with lots of data and charts! When Owen was one month old we did a post titled, "One Month of Sleepless Nights." Well we're still using the trixie tracker, and we're both still economists, so there really is no better way to show what a dramatically different baby Nora is than to delve into the data and examine how Nora has slept away her first month. Without further ado, here is Nora's first month of sleepy nights:



All the blue areas represent naps, the yellow areas show when she was awake, and the light blue is transition. Nora averaged a little over 15 hours of sleep a day for her first month, and slept completely through the night for the first time when she was four weeks old!

For comparison, below is Owen's sleep chart for his first month. Owen averaged about 13 hours of sleep a day and never came close to sleeping through the night in his first month (he didn't accomplish that feat until he was almost four months old).



We have all the data, so let's break this down a bit more. The chart below shows each of Nora and Owens naps with the start time on the X-axis and the length on the Y-axis. Let's focus on two areas, first the green ovals in the upper right of each chart: Nora fell asleep between roughly 10 pm and midnight and slept for over four hours 17 times in her first month with the longest being over 7 hours (note some of the dots are overlapping); Owen, on the other hand, did the same four times with the longest still well under 5 hours. In a related area of the chart, the red ovals in the bottom left show that Nora put us through the frustration of falling asleep in the middle of the night and waking up again in less than an hour only five times. Owen on the other hand treated us to these middle of the night cat naps 17 times in the first month.



One more way the trixie tracker lets us look at this data is a comparison to all the other trixie tracker users. The chart below shows Nora and Owen's average hours of sleep per week, along with the average for all trixie tracker babies, and the 95% confidence interval. Owen started out well below average and then ended up tracking close to but a hair under the average. Nora on the other hand has always been well above average for sleep time, and by her fourth week is near the top of the range!



What does all this mean? Probably not much in the long run, but for now we are all blissfully sleeping through the night, and my fears of feeling like a zombie from long and sleepless nights have proved completely unfounded.