Keeping a sleep log can help you find a sleep pattern when it comes to your baby. Combine it with a feeding log and you may be able to further your understanding and gain more insight about how your whole schedule plays a part when it comes to your baby’s care. Here are 8 tips to help you keep a sleep log:

1. Don’t delay

The longer you take to enter a nap or night sleep into your sleep log, the more likely it will be that you either forget about it or you become overwhelmed with how behind you have gotten. Try to enter a sleep period immediately after it ends to make it easy and manageable. If you do this, it will only take less than 30 seconds to enter your information. Using online baby care software, you can keep your page open to enter information seamlessly. Easier still, take it with you on your mobile with mobile sleep tracking.

2. Track long enough

It is very difficult to get much out of your sleep log if you don’t track your baby’s sleep long enough. Plan to log your baby’s sleep for at least 1-2 weeks in order to make the information as useful as possible. This also helps smooth out any “weird” days like the day you had to go to grandma’s house and got home late. These off days won’t throw a wrench in the conclusions you can make after you finish logging.

3. Look for sleep patterns

Once you have kept the sleep log long enough, you can begin to look for sleep patterns. Does your baby always wake up 30 minutes after bedtime? Does she consistently fight her last nap every day and is ready to transition to fewer naps? If you also track your baby’s diapers, you can answer questions like “Does your baby wake up in the middle of his morning nap because of a poopy diaper?” and try to rearrange meals to accommodate this and lengthen the nap.

Your sleep log can help you set your expectations and help set your baby’s sleep schedule. Once you know your baby’s average sleep needs, the amount of sleep in 24 hours stays relatively constant. Once you know the average sleep in 24 hours, you can set her schedule accordingly. For example, if you know she sleeps 13 1/2 hours, on average, and has napped 2 1/2 hours that day, you can expect she will sleep approximately 11 hours that night.

4. Make small changes

Once you have implemented a sleep schedule and have kept your sleep log, make any necessary tweaks or changes in small increments. Change nap times by 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there and the same for bedtime. Continue logging their sleep, so you know what is working on what is not.

5. Look at the forest, not the trees

Don’t base success or failure on just one day because it could just be an off day or a better than average day. We all have good days and bad days, sleep or otherwise, and so will your baby. That’s the benefit of keeping a sleep log because you can go back and see the big picture rather than a string of a few bad (or good) days. Looking at the big picture will help you know if you need help with your baby’s sleep or not.

6. Total vs. Average

As I mentioned before, your baby’s total sleep in 24 hours will stay relatively constant. Your baby can shift sleep from day to night and vice versa (within reason). Depending on how consistent he is, you may be able to predict sleep from one day to the next. For those inconsistent babies, you will likely need to use your baby’s average amount of sleep in 24 hours to make any educated guesses about how the day might go. On days he sleeps 11 1/2 hours at night, you can probably expect shorter naps (or at least one short nap) that day, for example. It is not a hard and fast rule, of course.

7. Try not to obsess…too much

It is easy to get fixated on the sleep log and look for patterns that may or may not be there. Unfortunately, some babies are simply inconsistent and the only thing that will be the same every day is the fact that the day will be different than yesterday. There might not really be anything you are doing right or you are doing wrong, so try not to drive yourself crazy…at least not too crazy.

Photo by Matthew Dobson on Flickr