Quotes About Routine

You are what you practice most.

Also, don't allow naps to run so late (past 4:00 P.M., perhaps) that they will interfere with falling asleep at night.

At any point, if she stopped crying or subsided to mild whimpering between checks, they were not to go back in:

If later in the night Betsy woke up and began crying hard again, they would restart the same pattern as at bedtime, waiting for three minutes, then five minutes, and working back up to ten minutes.

If Betsy was still asleep at 7:00 A.M., they would get her up no matter how much she'd been awake during the night.

At nap times, Betsy's parents would use the same routine. But if after half an hour Betsy had either cried the whole time or had fallen asleep and wakened again, they would end that nap period.

Eventually he will simply find it preferable to go back to sleep than to cry for fifteen or twenty minutes knowing he won't be rewarded with rocking, holding, or nursing. At the same time, he is learning to fall asleep, and feel comfortable, alone in the crib or bed.

Thus, in children, the first three or four hours of the night are spent mainly in very deep sleep from which the child is not easily roused. Parents are often aware of this fact, because the period of lighter sleep that follows, with more frequent wakings, may well begin at about the time they are going to sleep themselves.

By three or four months of age they will be getting most of their sleep at night, usually including an unbroken stretch of five to nine hours.

If instead you allow the times of your child's feedings, playtimes, baths, and other activities to change constantly, chances are his sleep will become irregular as well.

By age two, your child should still sleep about nine to ten hours at night, with a one- to two-hour nap after lunch—about eleven and a half hours total.

So don't let your two- or three-year-old decide what time he should go to bed—many would wait until they were so sleepy they could not stay awake any longer. Before long his schedule would be disrupted, becoming inconsistent and unpredictable

So if you are beginning to address a sleep problem in your child, be sure to set up a firm schedule and stick to it rigorously for several weeks after your child has begun sleeping well again.

If you can figure out why your child is sleeping poorly and make the necessary changes, he should be sleeping well much sooner—usually within a few days, two weeks at the most.

Each time you go to your child, spend no more than one or two minutes with him. Remember, your job is to reassure him (and yourself), not necessarily to help him stop crying, and certainly not to help him fall asleep: the goal is for him to learn to fall asleep on his own.

If your child wakes during the night, restart the schedule with the minimum waiting time for that night and work up to the maximum again from there.

Use the same waiting schedule for naps, but if your child has not fallen asleep after half an hour, or if he is awake again and calling or crying vigorously after even a short period of sleep, end that nap time.

No civilized person ever goes to bed the same day he gets up.

You can get used to horror, he thought. When it has lost immediacy and is no longer pungent and has become a steady diet. When it has degraded to a chain of mind-numbing events. ("Lover When You're Near Me")

Time had lost its multidimensional scope. There was only the present for Robert Neville; a present based on dayto-day survival, marked by neither heights of joy nor depths of despair. I am predominantly vegetable, he often thought to himself. That was the way he wanted it

Another day. Another collection of wracking hours.

A page a day is a book a year. Listen to that again: a page a day is a book a year.

You eventually have to return there to get most ordinary jobs done, but even those you will now do in a less compulsive or driven way.

Really? When? Had all his material become threadbare? After thirty years of marriage, were you supposed to come up with new stuff all the time?