Does eating solids help baby sleep through the night?

Ahh, the eternal question of how to get your baby to sleep through the night... I've been pondering it for months now. E has always been a bad sleeper. Well, not always. She started sleeping through the night (from 11pm to 6am) at about a month old. And as is typical for babies that age, she had no problem falling asleep during the day, although I remember her mostly napping in my arms. Around three months old, she started waking up twice a night. Since then her typical night is to fall asleep between 7:30 and 8pm, wake up between 11 and 1 and then again anywhere from 3 to 5 and then up for the day around 7:30 or 8am. A lot of interrupted sleep for mommy and baby (and daddy, too). Her napping has gotten progressively worse, too. A 30 minute nap is the norm, when I can get her to nap at all.

When you have a baby that doesn't sleep, you get a lot of "advice" on how to get her to sleep. One very common piece of advice is to feed the baby rice cereal or table food to "satisfy" her. The phrasing of that one really gets my goat. But, as much as I hate to admit it, the past two nights, E has been sleeping much better. First she woke at 2 and 6:30 (at which point she was up for the day), and last night she only woke once, at 5:15 (and went back to sleep for another 2 hours!). No significant improvement on the nap front, but a well-rested mommy can handle a nap-free day much better than an exhausted one.

 We'll see how it goes from here. Who knows? Maybe the last two nights have been a fluke, or maybe just a coincidence. But I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that, whatever the cause, she continues to sleep well at night.