EDIT: baby 2 wants me to publicly apologies as I made a mistake in the calculations with her data (for the R-people, as.POSIXct got me). Post now updated!

This summer, we doubled the sample size of our offspring experiment. We now have a sample size of n=2, so data analyses are really gearing up now!

First up, that crucial question: how are the nights? Are you getting some sleep? And most importantly, is baby 2 giving you a harder time than baby 1?

I’ll tell you our hypothesis first: we are feeling much better. Baby 2 seems to be giving us much more solid blocks of sleep than baby 1 did. We have vague memories of these first weeks with the first one, where we were bouncing a child through the living room in the middle of the night, trying in vain to get her screams to stop.

Baby 2 also has some issues (reflux is a bitch, I’ll tell you), but overall crying feels much lower, and sleep patterns more consistent. But does the data agree with our analysis? Let’s dive in!

After a first erroneous analysis which seemed to prove our hypothesis wrong, we can now proudly say that baby 2 indeed seems more parent-friendly! With things rapidly improving during the first few weeks (note that we were too flabbergasted to track those with baby 1), baby 2s performance has at first been more than an hour and now still on average more than 15 minutes above the one from baby 1.

Of course there is more to the night than the time between the two main feedings. While baby 1 always had a lot of trouble in the morning (so after that nightly feed), baby 2 also seems to be struggling through these hours a lot more independently. As a result, I now often find myself in bed at 6h30 in the morning, a rare sight with baby 1! So yes, life with baby 2 is a lot more livable than it was with baby 1.