Afternoon Sun and a Bit More Sleep

When you have a baby who wakes up from his nap a little early... and you realize you suddenly have a few rare minutes where the child to mummy ratio is 1:1, you grab the camera!

Malcolm at 7.5 months

He can sit solidly on his own, but once we try to entice him to crawl, he just rolls over on his back and grins.  He's no fool.  He knows that crawling = less time in someone's arms.  He's not ready for that, and quite frankly, neither am I.

We've had a few better nights.  We know Malcolm can self-soothe.  He can put himself back to sleep, but he was choosing not to.  Seven - eight months is notorious for the onset of separation anxiety.  They suddenly realize that you can go away and may not come back for a while... or, gasp, maybe not FOREVER!  It's possible that this was the root of his recent sleep issues.  In any case, he's still eating at 11ish, and then he gets a bottle of pumped breastmilk from Edward between 2:30-4:30, and he'll eat again between 5-7:30.  I can easily live with the 11 and 5-7:30 feeds, and the goal of giving him a bottle in the middle is to wean him off the habit of eating at that time.  

Weaning a baby off breastfeeding is a bit more complicated than weaning a bottle-fed baby.  With The Ducklings, anyone and everyone fed them their bottles.  So eating was strictly a biological requirement.  Once they were no longer hungry in the middle of the night, they stopped waking up to eat.  That didn't mean we were getting 8 hours of sleep, but the overnight feeds were pretty much a thing of the past by about 5-6 months.  

However, with breastfeeding, there is a biological and a psychological requirement of being comforted by me.  We weighed him on Friday, and he's tipping the scales at 19 pounds.  So clearly, he doesn't need to eat overnight - although to be fair to him, he is incredibly distracted during the day by his siblings and our boisterous household, and thus his day feeds aren't great.  Nevertheless, his feed times overnight are largely a habit by this point, combined with the need to be comforted.  We'll get there, but I truly believe that the last bit - giving up the reassurance and cuddles - is something Malcolm has to be ready to do.  Last night, he woke up and cried but rolled himself onto his side and fell asleep.  

Baby steps.  

Forecast: A Cold January With No Chance of Sleep

Apologies for the radio silence on the blog front.  I've been adjusting to Edward's return to work, the post-holidays daze, the frigid temperatures and a baby who defies sleep at every opportunity like it's his job.  More on that later.  

But first:

Dressed for -35 and the sledding hill

Someone is now officially too big for the bouncy chair (and 9 month pants)

A spinach/carrot/red pepper mustache

Ah, that adorable face.  The face that even for the fifth time and at 3am, I am compelled to kiss.  Malcolm has never been a great sleeper.  Our long, interrupted nights and subsequent foggy days are captured on calendars and random sheets of paper; proof of our high hopes and hard realities.  With a pacifier or without; nursed to sleep or not; quiet bedtime routines in semi-darkness or within the hubbub of our boisterous, busy house; rocked and held or put down.  It doesn't seem to matter.  He is resolute in waking up every two hours to feed.  Occasionally, we get a glimmer of hope, but then we're back in the sleep trough, stringing together a few hours of sleep a night.  We know he can put himself to sleep.  But that ability gets overridden by....?  Hunger?  Overstimulation?  Understimulation?  Noise?  No noise?  Alien visitation?  It remains a mystery.

The thing about having a challenging sleeper is that *everyone* has advice, and offers it very freely.  Books, other parents, neighbours, someone's uncle's brother's sister-in-law.  Everyone has their absolute "This is the ONLY thing that works".  "You HAVE to let them cry".  "You HAVE to take away their soother", "You HAVE to stop __________ (rocking them / holding them / singing to them / feeding them)" or you will Never. Sleep. Again.  I know they're well-intentioned.  But if there is one thing I've learned from being a mother of four, it's that One Miraculous Thing will not work for every baby.  God knows, it hasn't worked for mine.  My only advice for parents who have a challenging sleeper:  Unless you really want to be inundated with hair-raising stories about the poor parent who didn't __________, tell them that your baby is sleeping just fine, thank you.  Then run in the opposite direction.

And so, we continue to muddle along.   At some point, better sleep lies ahead.  We know this, and while we will continue to try to help him get there, a large part of our progress rests on him.  On really bad nights, Edward will mumble to me, only half-coherently, that "he HAS to sleep sometime".  And it's true, he will.  And when I stumble upon the 100%-Confirmed-One-Size-Fits-All-Magic-Bullet, I'll be sure to let you know..... once I make MY million.