Exploit this

Because I never have any idea what time Jack will take a nap or for how long he will stay asleep, I decided to go back to my roots and start keeping track of what time he eats and sleeps during the day. (At night I am too tired to be bothered; I figure if he sleeps through the night I’ll probably remember.) Basically, I wanted to figure out if he had a nap pattern that I could exploit.

So for ten days, I diligently made a note every time he took a nap or had a meal. I even wrote down for how long he fussed before falling asleep. And then I put all the data into Excel and plotted it. Look, it’s just how I think, OK? I am a very visual learner, and I need to see a graph. (And I thought of a clever way to plot it, if I do say so myself.)

Here’s the plot:



For those of you who are not visual learners, let me briefly interpret the data for you. Do you see those data points on the “Sleeping” axis? Each color represents a different day, and a data point means that Jack was asleep at that time for that day. You may have noticed that there is pretty much a solid line of data points. This means that, for any given minute during the day, Jack has been asleep for at least one day between January 1 and January 10. Well, except for the five minute period highlighted by the yellow circle; he was awake every day during that time for the days represented. Of course, he was asleep at that time yesterday, but I have given up on writing down all the times because there is obviously no point.

So, basically, he has no schedule. He is so anti-schedule that I cannot even guess at how many naps he takes a day, never mind at what time or for how long he will sleep. Oh well, he’s still pretty young, so maybe he’ll settle down into a routine during the next month or two.