Remember the dream feed?

The "dream feed" is what you might do with your infant when s/he goes down to sleep at 7 pm or so for a 5 hour stretch. To keep them asleep longer, without really waking them up, you "top them off" with an extra feed to get a little extra sleep.

Luckily, we never did the dream feed. The "sleep experts" insist infants all go to sleep around 7 pm or so, and do their longest sleep stretch then. Well, if Mommy and Daddy are kind of night owls, it stands to reason that the baby might be a night owl too, right? And Elizabeth sure was - she was most active from say 7 pm til midnight, or 1 or 2 am on some nights. But then, I'd get the long 5 or 6 hour sleep stretch from 12, 1 am til 5, 6 am, which wasn't really bad at all. (And then of course at 6 week she started sleeping regularly from midnight til 8 am, so we had no complaints at all. None!).

So, we passed the infant stage with no need for the dream feed. Now, we're experiencing the dream potty break. For the most part, potty training has been a good thing. No more diapers, even at night. Which brings us to the dream potty break. Sometime between 10 pm and midnight, we hear her - oh mommy, oh daddy, I have to go potty! We walk in, get her up, to the potty, she sits with her eyes mostly closed, does her thing, and we put her back in bed, fully asleep before her body touches the mattress. Some nights we have two - the typical one at 11 pm, and another at 3, or 4 or 5 am. When you've got a good sleeper, it's hard to complain, but you know what? I'd like to go back to sleeping through the night. Especially before it becomes absolutely impossible again.