Baby Sleep Log: Free & Printable Infant Sleep Log to Track Sleep Trends

It’s time to sleep train your little one, but you want to do it as smoothly as possible. A baby sleep log is KEY!

Here’s how to use this printable infant sleep log template!

  • Grab some colored pencils & your sleep log and start paying way more attention to the clock!
  • I recommend filling out the sleep log for a week before you start really sleep training. This can give you an idea of your current patterns so you’ll be able to have a rough idea of your baby’s ideal schedule.
  • Use the key listed to color code the hours of the day based on baby’s activity. The biggest benefit of this comes from:

1) quickly identifying an optimal schedule for baby

2) recognizing progress and patterns when crying it out

If you haven’t already, download my FREE newborn sleep guide. It’ll give you a good rundown on establishing good sleep for your newborn that you can print and keep with you! Download for free here 💤

Free Printable Sleep Log Template

Just click that image below to open up the infant sleep log in a new tab. Then you can save the PDF to your phone/computer, print it, or even edit it on your computer!

Keeping a close eye on timing and using this sleep log with your infant can make all the difference!

free printable baby sleep log pdf | The Peaceful Sleeper

Baby Sleep Log

Maddie’s Sleep Log

Here’s my sleep log from when I sleep-trained Maddie, my oldest. Keep in mind, this was my first child and my first experience ever sleep training so I was a total rookie.

I share this with you simply so you can see what a filled out baby sleep log actually looks like. I definitely made mistakes.

example of a filled out baby sleep log for 2 weeks with colored pencils | The Peaceful Sleeper

What You’ll Learn With an Infant Sleep Log

If you haven’t already, download my FREE newborn sleep guide. It’ll give you a good rundown on establishing good sleep for your newborn that you can print and keep with you! Download for free here 💤

A couple things you can see with Maddie’s log:

The crying it out got SO much better almost immediately. Really it was just the first 2-3 days that she had to cry it out before bed, and it wasn’t even for that long.

You can also see how over those first 2 weeks her nap times started to solidify. After using this data, I created a pretty set schedule that worked very well for her.

If you haven’t already, download my FREE newborn sleep guide. It’ll give you a good rundown on establishing good sleep for your newborn that you can print and keep with you! Download for free here 💤

The last major thing to note is that day 13 saw a MAJOR hiccup. If it hadn’t been for this log, we would have thrown in the towel and sworn that crying it out sucks and doesn’t work. Except it totally had been working, we just forgot because we had a crappy night. BUT look at how long she’d been awake before that… homegirl was totally over-tired and that’s why she was having such a hard time falling asleep!

mother writing and making notes in her babys sleep log | The Peaceful Sleeper

I definitely made mistakes here that I can only see now that I have more experience and expertise.

  1. The time between initial wake up and her first nap of the day was too long. Most babies are happier with about 90 minutes of wake time first thing in the morning.
  2. It looks like she was waking up fairly regularly at around 10pm, which I had her cry though. In hindsight, I could have used that as a dream feed. In general, don’t recommend crying it out in the middle of the night. When their sleep needs are met during the day they’ll drop night feedings on their own. I just didn’t know that then.
  3. Most of those days, she didn’t have as many naps as she needed. Again, I just didn’t know what the ideal schedule was (again, tracking with this sleep log was the best way to know). Until 9 months, babies usually do best with 3 naps per day
  4. Bedtime was way too late on day 1 and I shouldn’t have done any CIO for naps. On day 1, I recommend doing everything you can to get them to nap well so that when bedtime rolls around (6:30pm) they’re not over-tired. This will set you up to be successful for night 1, and then you can CIO for naps on day 2.

I love looking back at this chart and remembering myself then. It’s crazy how much we learn and grow when we have kids. We’re all kind of winging it, and especially with our first kids, we just don’t know what we don’t know!

Recap of Why You Should Use a Baby Sleep Log

baby waking up as mother logs the nap | The Peaceful Sleeper

Hopefully this breakdown helps YOU in your journey of sleep training so it’s as smooth and painless as possible!

Remember to print this sleep log template (or you can fill it out on a PDF editor) and fill out it meticulously for two weeks. Just doing that will help you start to learn patterns, trends, and even your own mistakes (like I did)!

If you haven’t already, feel free to click here to print out the baby sleep log!

And if you’re needing more sleep tips and age-specific advice, sign up for the free sleep series. Sign up also gets you access to the Newborn Sleep Guide, filled with 7 awesome (and effective) tips to get baby sleeping!

If you haven’t already, download my FREE newborn sleep guide. It’ll give you a good rundown on establishing good sleep for your newborn that you can print and keep with you! Download for free here 💤

Happy Sleeping!

xoxo

Chrissy

Christine Lawler

Christine Lawler

MS, LMFT, Certified Pediatric Sleep Consultant

Hi! I’m so glad you’re here! I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, practicing for over 13 years. I’ve set out to do ALL of the research and I created a method to optimize baby sleep that is tuned in, empowering and WORKS. There absolutely should be joy in motherhood, and I have learned that every baby CAN get better sleep!

Read more about my team here.

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