Nearing the end
We are almost out of the newborn phase. Lou is going to be three months old in a week and a half. Three months is the magical age when he hopefully will have figured out how to cope with the world, his bumbling parents, and his little growing body. Hooray!
Actually he has been showing more and more signs of being a generally content little creature. In the morning, he wakes up smiling (most of the time), and it's so much fun. I am so happy that Chris gets to have this cheerful time in the morning with him because the evenings are still a challenge. But waking up next to a baby with a big smile on his face is simply joyful. Since he has been doing that, I've just felt so much more calm about my day, and I feel like I can do things like cook dinner or train for the NYC marathon.
We may be settling into a schedule of sorts. I've discovered that he can be awake for about an hour before he starts to fuss, and I know I need to put him down for a nap. Until this week I was pretty ineffective at getting him to nap. There has been a lot of putting down and picking back and nursing and rocking and reading and putting pacifiers in and swaddling and unswaddling. And he probably slept about 20-30 minutes every hour. Unless I was wearing him and walking. Exhausting. But last night Chris and I decided on a bedtime for the little guy and a bedtime routine. At 8 PM I nursed him and gave him a bath. Then, we swaddled him with just a clean diaper on and put him in a sleep sack. We read him a book, put him in his crib with a pacifier, and then left to eat our dinner. For some reason, although he cried at various points during our little bedtime dance, he didn't cry when we left. He wasn't asleep. His pacifier had fallen out. But he was happy and snug in his crib, and he slept there until 2 A.M. Then he woke to eat, and we kept him with us in bed for the rest of the night.
And today, after every hour of wakefulness, I've been changing his diaper, swaddling him up, reading a book, and then putting him in his crib and leaving. And he's been napping for about two hours at a time. Miracle.
I think the solution to all my parenting conundrums is to do excessive research on the Internet about it, express my worries to Chris, and then wait it out. Not really sure if I've done anything to help him actually start sleeping more during the day, and I will keep this routine up, but I'm pretty certain that we have an amazingly brilliant baby (as are all babies) who is basically figuring it out as he gets older. So really all I have to do is keep him alive and he will do the rest.
Actually he has been showing more and more signs of being a generally content little creature. In the morning, he wakes up smiling (most of the time), and it's so much fun. I am so happy that Chris gets to have this cheerful time in the morning with him because the evenings are still a challenge. But waking up next to a baby with a big smile on his face is simply joyful. Since he has been doing that, I've just felt so much more calm about my day, and I feel like I can do things like cook dinner or train for the NYC marathon.
We may be settling into a schedule of sorts. I've discovered that he can be awake for about an hour before he starts to fuss, and I know I need to put him down for a nap. Until this week I was pretty ineffective at getting him to nap. There has been a lot of putting down and picking back and nursing and rocking and reading and putting pacifiers in and swaddling and unswaddling. And he probably slept about 20-30 minutes every hour. Unless I was wearing him and walking. Exhausting. But last night Chris and I decided on a bedtime for the little guy and a bedtime routine. At 8 PM I nursed him and gave him a bath. Then, we swaddled him with just a clean diaper on and put him in a sleep sack. We read him a book, put him in his crib with a pacifier, and then left to eat our dinner. For some reason, although he cried at various points during our little bedtime dance, he didn't cry when we left. He wasn't asleep. His pacifier had fallen out. But he was happy and snug in his crib, and he slept there until 2 A.M. Then he woke to eat, and we kept him with us in bed for the rest of the night.
And today, after every hour of wakefulness, I've been changing his diaper, swaddling him up, reading a book, and then putting him in his crib and leaving. And he's been napping for about two hours at a time. Miracle.
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