Baby Sleeping Stats

The first few days after Cayman was born, he seemed to sleep and eat at random intervals. After a few sleepless nights of waking up for feedings, I started to wonder if there were patterns to when he was hungry and when he was tired. Shelley started keeping track of three behaviors: awake, sleeping, and eating. I put the behaviors into Excel and a month later we had this:

Close Up:

 

In the plots above, blue represents sleep, orange represents feeding time, and green awake time. Each column represents one day.

When we first started tracking him at a week old, the left side of the graph, we saw an unpredictable schedule filled with late night feedings and awake time. We certainly had a more ideal schedule in mind. We thought if we slowly worked at it, a schedule compromise between his schedule and our ideal schedule could be achieved. We calculated his average sleep requirement and noticed better nights (more sleeping) were associated with awake time from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. However, awake time from 6:00 to 9:00 PM was associated with sleep time from 3:00 to 6:00 PM, and so on (a butterfly/domino affect). We decided we would focus on trying to keep him awake from 6:00 to 9:00 PM and encouraging him to sleep from 3:00 to 6:00 PM. For the most part this worked as shown by the right half of graph. The green band near the bottom right half of the graph represents awake time from 6:00 to 9:00 PM. As of now, Cayman wakes up once per night for a feeding and quickly falls back asleep.

Cayman's sleep pattern is shown below. He averages 15 hours, 20 minutes, and 12 seconds of sleep a day with a standard deviation of 1.54 hours. This means there is lots of variation in his sleep where he sometimes sleeps around 14 hours and sometimes around 17.5 hours. As the plot below shows he tends to alternate between a low sleep day than a high sleep day. In fact, he has very little moderate sleep days; he seems to like the extremes.



More valuable to us is when he is sleeping. Ideally, we would like him to sleep as much as possible when we are sleeping from 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM (we don't sleep this entire period, but we would like to option to). When looking at the proportion of time he sleeps during the 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM period, we get the the plot below.

The lowest dot represents a night when Cayman only slept for 50% of the time between 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM. The highest dot represents our best night of sleep when Cayman slept about 97% of the night. The orange line is the linear regression (least squares) trendline and shows that overtime, the proportion of time he is sleeping between 9:30 PM to 8:00 AM is increasing. If the trend continues, we can expect him to sleep an additional 3.78 minutes each night.