Sleep Wheel
The chart below shows how a typical infant’s waking time increases as he grows older. The pie chart represents a 24-hour day for the child at different ages.
The dark slices are sleeping periods and the light slices are wakeful times. Notice that the naps not only become fewer and farther apart, but are pushed over into the nighttime hours, leaving only the afternoon nap by age three or four.
This does not represent a suggested schedule but rather a model for amount of sleep that our child needs at different ages. If we follow the Eat - Awake - Sleep routine for the older baby, the feeding will generally happen at the end of the dark slice. (The first three or four weeks the awake time will just be feeding and changing and then back to sleep.)
The dark slices are sleeping periods and the light slices are wakeful times. Notice that the naps not only become fewer and farther apart, but are pushed over into the nighttime hours, leaving only the afternoon nap by age three or four.
This does not represent a suggested schedule but rather a model for amount of sleep that our child needs at different ages. If we follow the Eat - Awake - Sleep routine for the older baby, the feeding will generally happen at the end of the dark slice. (The first three or four weeks the awake time will just be feeding and changing and then back to sleep.)