Sleep regression

Henry has been on a mission to roll over for the past week and he finally did yesterday!! On an unrelated note, he also cried his first actual tears. Usually his eyes just get watery but a couple of drops escaped, poor guy. With all of these new changes going on, he's also been going through a classic sleep regression which has been really tough. He was doing so well and now all of a sudden his naps are minimal, (unless I'm holding him) and is way more fussy in general. Luckily I know this is just a phase and he'll grow out of it soon. I thought this was a good description of what goes on during these developmental milestones. It certainly made me feel a lot better!

Your baby is also going through enormous developmental spurts that you can't see, because they're dealing with cognitive processes. They work through these spurts the same way they work through the physical spurts, but when your baby is practicing recognizing patterns, you can't see that. Leading up to the actual new skill the baby is going to go through several weeks of intense brain work and prep that you can't necessarily see (unless you know specifically what to look for). One of the side effects of this brain work is that they don't sleep as well as they do during times in which they're not about to master a new skill. They may seem restless in the night (like they do sometimes when mastering a physical skill) but it's just nothing you can see and label. So we call it a sleep regression.

Once a baby has learned the new skill, s/he will often sleep through the entire night for 1-3 nights after mastering the skill. Which is freaky from the parents' perspective, because you go from waking 10 times one night to sleeping 12 hours the next. But it makes complete sense if you know that the baby was working on this really tough challenge and couldn't help but wake up so often (in fact it's probably a miracle that the baby could even fall asleep in the first place with so much going on in the noggin), and then once they've got it they relax and sleep it off for a couple of days, like sleeping off a crazy party. Then they'll most likely go back to sleeping the way they were before they started working on the new developmental skill.