Until I had a kid, I thought the relationship between tired and falling asleep was a proportional one. As tired & time increased, so did the likelihood of falling asleep.

Oh God was I wrong.

As soon as you have your sweet little bundle of all that is good and holy in the world, you learn about “overtired.” Aka, this child has gone to bezonkers land and won’t fall asleep until the gas literally runs out.

(Excuse the graph quality. It’s my first attempt to do a graph in Photoshop!)

So, you see there’s that sleep window. When you might be able to lay down that sweet little soft head, if you’re lucky walk away, and in 5 or 10 minutes you have a sleeping child. It is the holy grail of nap and sleeptime.

In the pink, you have “overtired.” Also known as, kiss that shower/coffee/lunch/clean up/staring at a wall time goodbye because this nap is about to get skipped. If it’s night time? Oh dear, you might have a kid up the rest of the night, literally climbing the walls of her room/crib/child confinement device. No streaming “Gilmore Girls” for you.

Now, I know (I KNOW) there are some of you that might not agree with this characterization. And it’s true. All babies are different; they are individuals with individual sleep habits. I have looked at other parents with a sleepy child and then proceeded to watch that child cuddle up into her dad’s arms and go to sleep. Whaaaaaatsis? It seems impossible, and yet it’s true — that child just got tired and then went to sleep. Dave and I have often looked at each other all, “how in the world did that just happen? Could you even imagine Bean doing that? HAHAHAHA. (Cry cry cry)”

Needless to say, these same parents to not understand why we start sweating and checking our watches and making excuses to leave at the first sign of a mere yawn.

So, in other words, some babies are like this:

Look at that nice, broad sleep window. Oh, jealousy.

My baby is like this:

Oh, what a precipitous drop it is into overtired land.

The key, of course, is to figure out your kid’s sleep window.

 

Signs that your baby is approaching a sleep window (partially cribbed from The Baby Whisperer):

Newborn

• Yawning
• Thousand yard stare
• Self-comforting by petting face/eyes with hands

Baby that can move its head

• All of the above plus:
• Burrowing face in your shoulder
• Turning head away from stimulus

Baby that can handle objects

• All of the above plus:
• Dropping objects
• Getting increasingly clumsy with hands
• Self soothing — pacifier or thumb
• Rubbing eyes

Baby that can crawl

• All of the above plus:
• Slowing down movement
• Become less coordinated moving around (collapse onto tummy)
• Stop playing with toys
• Sometimes, arching away from you if you pick them up, especially if they’re used to sleeping alone

Baby that can walk

• All of the above plus:
• Taking stumbles
• Getting super clumsy

Or, if you’re following a sleep book’s recommendations for wake times, and you’ve been keeping a sleep diary,and know how much time your baby needs between naps, you can just time it. For a while, Bean was on the one hour awake-one hour asleep schedule, then her wake times slowly increased. That eventually morphed into the 2-3-4 nap and sleep schedule around 6 or 7 months old (first nap is 2 hours after waking, second nap is 3 hours after waking, bedtime is 4 hours after waking).

 

Of course, most sleep problems occur in the overtired end of the spectrum.

Signs that your baby may be overtired:

• It’s about the time she should go to sleep, and instead she’s howling her head off
• You’ve been trying to get her to sleep for 2 hours.
• You think it’s her nap time and she’s still going extremely strong.
• Her bedtime has become much later all of a sudden; usually she sleeps at 7pm, but it’s been taking her until 9pm to get to sleep.
• She’s skipping naps, but you think she still needs them because she’s a cranky mess of a child.
• She’s acting very out of character, in a bad way.

The catch about overtired is that it almost always catches me by surprise, even someone who knows that my kid is prone to getting overtired.

Once, after nearly two weeks of not convincing Bean to take her second nap of the day, my sister-in-law told me to put her down an hour earlier the next day. Pshaw! The child was clearly ready to drop her nap. Oooor not. She fell asleep like a dream the next day, and didn’t drop her nap for another few months. New mama got schooled.

Almost every time Dave and I have the “maybe she’s just going to sleep later these days” discussion, it’s really a sign that we need to get Bean to bed even earlier in the day. Bedtimes can fluctuate depending on whether your kid is learning new things (new walkers), has something new in their lives (new daycare), or just naturally amping up their daily exertion level from the baby days.

On top of this, overtired can become a state, not just a one-day thing. If Bean has had a rough night of teething, I’m assured poor quality, short naps the next day as well
. If she has a lousy nap one day? It will take her a couple days to recover. Again, it’s counterintuitive, but bad sleep sometimes begets bad sleep. Good sleep begets good sleep.

So, what do you do when you find yourself with an overtired child who must fall asleep? We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

 

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(Want more Baby Sleep Week? Check out Pick A Sleep Book, Any Sleep Book, Start A Sleep Diary, Self-Soothing Meets Accidental Parenting, and Accepting Your Limitations.)