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.