Night, night

Paxton has been sleeping through the night, at last.

For the first many months of his life, I was dragging my exhausted self up to Pax's bedroom every few hours, at least, throughout the night. I don't think I even knew I was waking up sometimes. I would just find myself on the couch with him, breastfeeding. I wouldn't even really know how I got there. That's probably not really safe when you have a newborn and a spiral staircase, but we managed to survive.

Now I'm applying that same sleep-deprived mentality, but using a "tough love" twist. When I hear Paxton start to cry, I turn off the baby monitor and set my alarm clock for ten minutes from that time. Then I fall right back to sleep. When the alarm goes off, I turn the baby monitor back on. If Paxton is still crying, I get up and tend to his needs. But at least half the time, he's fast asleep again. YAY! The books say that when I baby is six-months-old, he gains the ability to self-soothe. I decided I'd wait until Paxton was just about that age before I let him "cry it out" a bit. I didn't feel like he had the capability to know that I was still around before that point. So many times, a little whimper would escalate into a very freaked-out scream in no time flat. That broke my heart. But now, he seems to know that I'll be there eventually. He might get more angry as more time passes, but he never seems terrified that he's all alone in the world.

I still apply the lessons I learned about the 90-minute baby sleep schedule from that book I read and loved. Paxton is textbook in that department. He wakes up and I can count 90 minutes exactly before I see him start to rub his red eyes. It's rare that he has more than 90 minutes of awake time in one sitting. And his naps are getting longer and more frequent. Our schedule for the last 24 hours was pretty typical--he went to bed around 8 last night. He woke up at 4:45 this morning, with a very full diaper. We stayed up for about an hour, as I changed and fed him (and then he proceeded to throw up every last drop of breastmilk he had ingested, so I had to change his clothes--and mine). So that was nearly nine hours of uninterrupted sleep. Then I laid him back down around 6:30 a.m. and he slept until 9:45. We got up and I took him out to visit my mom. Back to sleep at 11:30 or so and he woke up around 1:30. Went swimming. Brought him home and he laid down for another nap around 3. Slept until about 4:30. And I laid him back down for a nap at 6:30. We usually don't do a nap this late in the day, because it's very possible that he'll just sleep through the night now. I wanted to give him his bath tonight and give him some solids for dinner. But we were on sort of a weird schedule. Maybe he'll wake up later and we can do all that before we call it a night.

In the past, all of this good sleeping was a faint hope. He was never a baby who would just doze off in the living room while I was holding him. Car rides lulled him to sleep, but that's about it. What I didn't know was that I had to help him, and I had to provide some consistency. Now, it's the norm for me to lay him down in his crib when it's time for him to nap and he generally goes right to sleep without a peep. If I wait too long and he's overly tired, he may cry a bit before he fades out. I love that we've made it over these humps, even though it breaks my heart a little that he's growing up so fast.

He turned six months yesterday, by the way. He has already accomplished so much. He learns something new every day now, it seems. I wish I could freeze time and just enjoy every minute for longer. I can't believe that in six more months, we'll be celebrating his first birthday. It seems like a miracle. I get all sentimental at the thought of my little baby growing up. Sigh. It goes too fast.