The Trixie Update

This is interesting. I didn’t expect the voting to be so close. So I’m going to try to knock things loose a little. Here’s a reference chart for an adult who’s on a pretty regular sleep schedule. It might help in interpreting the toddler charts.

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Did you study hard for the Trixie Update Sleep Challenge? I hope so, because this is a closed book test. Yep, the Sleep Log archives are off-line until Monday. You’ll have to rely on memory, experience and gut instinct.

Here’s the challenge. There are 4 graphs below. One of these represents Trixie’s actual awake time over the last year (from about age 3.5 months to 15.5 months). The rest were made with fake and intentionally misleading data. What we’re looking for here is the total awake time for each day. Doesn’t matter whether the day was broken up with naps or not. Just the total awake time.

To put this in context imagine what your own chart might look like. For example, I usually only get about 6-7 hours of sleep a night. So my chart would be a fairly straight line that bounced between 17 and 18 hours, and would look much nicer than most of the choices below.

So, ready to go? Pick out the real one and vote your answer (poll is to your left under Latest TTU Comments). Come back Monday to see if you got it right.

Update [Fri. 11pm]: Want a hint? Come back Saturday.

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After taking this trip, I realize that Trixie’s decent sleep schedule exists only because of routine and familiarity. Once you throw those out the window, you get to see what horrible kinds of sleep instincts are still buried in that exhausted little brain.

Our plan was to begin the trip at bedtime, let Trixie fall asleep on the way up, and then carefully move her — still asleep — once we arrived around midnight. Trixie’s plan was to grab a short nap on the trip up, and then have us carefully move her — wide awake — once we arrived. She then proceeded to stay up until 2am.

As for the sleeping arrangements, Trixie slept (screamed) in the Pack ‘N Play portable crib during this trip. It wasn’t ideal, but it’s really the only solution because it just doesn’t work to bring Trixie into our bed. She is a kicker. She’ll also try to peel your eyelids or ears right off your face. In short, letting Trixie in our bed is dangerous, and it only happens when we make bad decisions in the middle of the night.

So for the duration of the trip, Trixie didn’t sleep that well overnight and she refused to take a nap during the day. The only time she actually fell asleep was from sheer exhaustion, and by the time we got to this point she was stumbling around, bumping into things, babbling incoherently, grinding her fists into her eyes and generally acting like she was drunk.

I also think Trixie was getting stressed out from waking up in a new place every time she fell asleep. She falls asleep in the car, wakes up in a strange apartment. Falls asleep in front of the Capital, wakes up in a coffee shop. By Monday she was struggling to keep her eyes open out of fear of where she might end up next. I know I would be a little freaked out. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode for toddlers.

Despite sleep challenges, we had a great trip and I’m ready to hit the road again. Trixie, however, is still catching up on her sleep.

Oh yeah, the title? Trixie Standard Time, of course.

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We’ve looked at Trixie’s sleep cycles a lot since we started collecting data at about 4 months, and things are definitely better now than they were back then. Basically, her overnight sleep patterns are pretty stable, and we’ve been successful at shifting her bedtime to an earlier hour (on most days.)

Her daytime nap schedule is still surprisingly irregular. On the positive side, her many daily catnaps have slowly consolidated into only two naps a day. But unfortunately, despite our best efforts, those daytime naps can vary wildly from day to day depending on her mood. It’s something we’re still working on.

For me, displaying 8 months worth of sleep data is an interesting challenge. The information is always available to anyone in the Sleep Log, but the full chart takes up almost a dozen screens on my browser. It’s good for looking at small ranges of time — not the big picture. Fortunately we can compress the data in such a way that makes it easier to look at patterns. Here are a couple of charts that cover the last eight months:

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I always imagined that real babies would wake up the way they do in cartoons. You know, a sunbeam breaks through the blinds, and the sleepy little baby slowly blinks awake, streeeeetches, yawwwns, and maybe even rolls over in an attempt to snuggle back to dreamland.

So, my question is, is there any way to get them to stop screaming when they just wake up? I guess first I should ask whether it’s something that all babies do, or if it’s only Trixie.

No matter what time of day she wakes up, whether it’s after a good night’s sleep or just a 38-minute nap, Trixie is vertical and hollering within seconds of waking.

I’ve watched her wake up before. When it’s close to the end of her nap, I’ll peek in from behind the door. She’ll usually be peacefully sprawled out. Then without warning, she’ll twitch a little and suddenly flip herself over and urgently begin to pull up on the crib bars — all in one move. Picture someone in a cage being lowered into a pool of water. That’s the sort of desperate struggling, yelling and clawing up the side of the crib I’m talking about.

The panic stops the instant one of us goes to pick her up, so it’s not something I’m concerned about. Besides, the quirky wake state could simply be a genetic trait she got from her mother. Jenn tends to wake up rather ‘alert’. I once slept through a tornado that removed the roof from my house.

Otherwise, I figure Trixie’s either having bad dreams right before she wakes up or she’s naturally suited to join one of those fringe conspiracy groups where sleeping with your boots on and waking up in a state of emergency is encouraged. All I know is that when the revolution comes, she’ll be ready.

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As I have stated many times before on this site, sleep is really the only thing that new parents want. They want their baby to sleep and they want to be able to sleep themselves. And they want both to happen in big 8-10 hour chunks. (We still suffer from a sleep deficit stretching back 8 months.) In my quest to understand and try to crack Trixie’s sleep code, I introduce yet another way to quantify her sleep habits: The Sleep Probability Spectrum.

The Sleep Probability chart is simply an average of Trixie’s daily Sleep Maps for a given set of days. The averages are translated to a gray-scale spectrum. The stronger the contrast, and the larger the pattern, the more predictable her sleep habits for the time period examined. It’s designed to collapse a range of time into 10-minute increments on a 24 hour scale in order to figure out if there are any patterns developing.

The probability of Trixie being asleep at a particular time of day for the given range of days is expressed as a gray-scale value. Solid black represents a 100% probability that she was asleep. Solid white means a 100% probability that she was awake. The gray areas represent different degrees of uncertainty regarding her sleep schedule. 50% gray indicates a complete lack of schedule. It means there was an equal (or completely random) chance of her being awake or asleep.

What kind of predictive value do these Probability Spectrums have? Unfortunately not as much as I’d I hoped - or at least I haven’t figured out a way to apply them yet. But they are great for looking back at her progress over the past five months. Of course, when you start at the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.

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For an explanation of these images please see:
Sleep Cartography and
The Good, the Bad and the In-between

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(or How Random is Random?)

I’ll admit my bias as a visually oriented person. I am personally drawn to Trixie’s Sleep Maps for their intricate, cartographic patterns. However, while these charts are excellent at expressing disorder — a single glance reveals the unpredictable chaos of the last 7 weeks — they are not so good at revealing patterns, except in cases where the pattern is overwhelming, such as the vertical columns of the ideal sleep map.

The underlying problem is that unless a sleep map is awfully close to ideal, it’s always going to appear chaotic. These maps are good at revealing either perfect or imperfect situations; they have a hard time teasing out any middle ground.

Given this bias, how do you judge how bad a sleep map is? How do you decide what’s a little bit random and what’s a lot random? Even if part of the map stabilizes, such as Trixie’s overnight sleep habits did for the last week, how can you evaluate the rest of the chart?

This problem can be solved if the sleep data is converted into another format. When expressed as a scatterplot, all sorts of very specific patterns are revealed - including Trixie’s infamous ~38 minute cat naps - as well as more subtle trends and even anomalous incidents.

The Distribution Charts below reveal that there are more patterns at work here than previously thought:

The most prominent feature of the Sleep Distribution Chart is the almost solid black line near the bottom that runs from about 7 in the morning to 7 at night. This cluster of dots represents the infamous 38 minute (+/- 5 minutes) naps that are so infuriating to deal with. Fortunately there is a new trend developing directly above this area that represents longer, more substantive naps ranging from 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours. We look forward to this line darkening in. We also hope to see more plots in the upper right-hand corner which reflects Trixie going to bed between 9pm-midnight and sleeping for 7+ hours.

The Wakefulness Distribution Chart does not have as many defined regions. The chart could almost be described by a single arch stretching from early morning to late night that reaches it’s apex around 4:30pm. This reflects her tendency to stay awake progressively longer periods as the day progresses, and then shorter periods from late night to early morning. The main area of concern on this chart is the medium density region between midnight and 6am. These points indicate where she has woken up in the middle of the night, sometimes for 30 minutes or more.

We now understand a little more what we are dealing with. Yet the question remains - Are we any closer to cracking The Sleep Code?

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This horrible, random mess is a visual representation of the past 45 days of Trixie’s sleep cycle. As in the Sleep Log, yellow depicts awake periods and blue sleep. The format has been vertically compressed with higher contrast colors to emphasize any patterns (or lack thereof) creating a map of her sleep habits.

It’s obvious at a glance that there’s no strong pattern for the majority of this time period. To be fair, small clusters of order do exist representing minor successes, such as the middle left between the hours of about 1:00 am and 5:00 am, but they are simply overwhelmed by the surrounding chaos.

The lines marking 6:00 am and 9:00 pm represent the Blue Zone — the ideal overnight sleep period. In a perfect world, Trixie would be asleep by 9 and let us sleep until at LEAST 6:00 am. As you can see, this zone is regularly violated with impunity. We don’t fare much better outside the Blue Zone either; her morning and afternoon nap periods are maddeningly irregular. The most annoying habit, which she is slowly growing out of, is the 38 minute cat nap. These are the tiny blue dashes interspersed throughout the map. To her credit, she has been taking consistently longer naps over the past 2 weeks, and those tiny dashes appear less frequently.

But even when taking longer naps, there is still no predictable pattern. She should be taking 2-3 multi-hour naps a day, preferably at about the same time, and sleeping through the night. The goal is to slowly move her toward some kind of schedule. This doesn’t seem like too much to ask for, but we’re not seeing much progress. The pattern for the latest week doesn’t seem any less random than the pattern for the earliest one.

So what does the ideal sleep map look like? It actually wouldn’t look much like a map at all. The intricate, irregular geographies would give way to boring, but beautiful, vertical stripes stretching deep into the night.

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There are three variables that must be managed to raise a human child. Energy intake, waste removal and unit recharging. During the course of these past five months the first two have vexed us at the Trixie Update to no end. Longtime readers will recall the saga of Milk Week and all the work that the milk cycle entails. And of course who can forget the excretory nightmare of diaper explosions, leaks and general messiness as the diaper count numbered in the thousands. But these previous conditions pale in comparison to the duress and trauma caused by the third variable — Sleep.

It should have been obvious from the start. Milk and Bottle management? It takes a long time to starve. There’s always time to recover if we messed up a little. And the rest is just a little bit of soapy water and elbow grease. Diapers? Again, humans have lived in filth for centuries before modern times. At least we have the benefit of a washing machine. But sleep, that’s a whole other animal. How long can the human body function without sleep? A day? Maybe two - but what kind of decisions do you make under those conditions? Sleep deprivation takes an incredible toll on the body, and that is why Trixie’s sleep cycle has become the final frontier.

Trixie slept with us the first 3 1/2 months. This was not the ideal sleep situation according to half the parenting books out there, but the other half said it was ok. Our bed presented its own set of problems. A super-soft, pillowtop mattress with lots of pillows, blankets and two giant bodies surrounding Trixie is pretty much the textbook SIDS situation. The only thing that could make it more dangerous would be to throw in a nice big pile of cat hair. Still, she managed to survive and we enjoyed having the little peanut to snuggle with until she started to kick us at all hours of the night. Thus began the transition to the crib.

We let her cry herself to sleep in the crib. It’s painful to listen to at first, but after a couple of days you get used to it and after a week or so, it actually becomes pretty hilarious. All you are doing is gently laying her down in a nice warm baby-sized sleep space and she’s screaming like a cat being butchered. It does get funny. I understand it’s going to be even funnier when language is throw into the mix and she starts screaming “Help ME! Save ME!” in these benign situations.

The biggest problem in the crib transition brings us back to the first variable: food. When she was sleeping with us, Jennifer could feed her at any time during the night with very little effort. Now there’s lots of stumbling around in the dark, and bad decisions are made at 3 in the morning about whether we should put her back in the crib or take her to bed with us.

We are now acting under pediatrician’s orders not to feed Trixie between midnight and 5am. If she wakes up at 3am, we can go say hello and maybe tuck her in again, but no food. This schedule appeared to work pretty well leading up to the holidays and then it all went to hell. We’re still trying to recover but it seems that Trixie is totally regressing. And this is how things stand today. Every night is unpredictable but we continue to slog ahead with our sleep campaign dreaming of victory.

Coming Soon: Sleep Charts!

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