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.