I am behind on posting so I'll be posting more pics this week in scheduled posts, don't worry!
A quick update on the sleeping: earlier this week was particularly bad. One night I got a total of 3 hours sleep. The thing is, the cries Little Sir was crying were sounding very much like "pain cries" to me, not just "I don't want to go to sleep". He was also doing a lot of arching his back when he was eating and afterward, which usually means there is some reflux or other stomach issue. Since he only does this at night, and night is the only time he gets formula (we give him 6 oz formula before bed because I can't produce enough to get him through the night. So yes, he is not entirely breastfed. Get over it.), I started to suspect that he is having trouble with something in the formula, maybe the lactose? I called the doctor about this and she said that this is definitely a possibility. She recommended a version of formula that is for sensitive stomachs and contains no lactose and also things that help the stomach digest.
This is the third night with the new formula, as well as some other techniques such as keeping Little Sir upright for 10-15 minutes after he eats to help him digest, and burping him for longer. He's not sleeping through the night but he's hasn't been waking up every 1-2 hours! I am very happy to think that he probably isn't in pain anymore.
He still puts up a fight around 11PM/midnight every night - he wakes up and doesn't want to go back to sleep. But we have been working on our version of sleep training and I think eventually it will pay off.
Keep checking this week for some more random photos!
So today we attempted to give Little Sir some rice cereal. He was NOT a fan. I have NEVER seen the faces he was making!!! I guess I always thought that expressions of disgust and horror were something that maybe we learned from our social interactions and later replicate, but as far as I know Little Sir has never observed someone be disgusted and horrified...yet here he is, perfectly expressing those emotions toward rice cereal.
Wow, he totally hated it.
I mean, it was kind of funny, really!
Here is the video - I uploaded it in it's full size so if you have a slow internet connection you'll have to wait for a while for the whole thing, but it is worth it!
I guess after this experience we will either need to try a different brand of rice cereal or maybe some oat cereal? Can we do that? I will have to look that up on the internets.
Today was Little Sir's 4 month pediatrician's appointment and he is very healthy and TALL!
14 lbs 10 oz (50th percentile)
26.25 inches long (95th percentile)
head is 40-something (42 maybe?)
His head is on the small side but it is also tall, so the doctor said she is not worried about that at all. He is a tall guy! This explains why all his 3 month pants are too short. He has to wear 6 month pants or they get all "high water" on him.
On a related note, can anyone recommend good baby shoes that don't come off? He kicks off both his socks and shoes constantly!
And no, he is still not sleeping at night longer than 1-2 hours at a time. We tried co-sleeping instead of CIO, and that didn't really work either because he cries just as long and loudly when we are right there beside him as he does when he is in his crib. I have honestly no idea why he is crying anymore. He is not hungry or cold or hot or lonely (because we are right there). But he is definitely MAD.
We are a "go" to try rice cereal, so I bought some today. We'll probably wait until tomorrow to try it, since he is still recovering from his shots today. We'll take some pictures of it!
You might be wondering where we have been the last 3 days, and why I haven't posted cute pictures of Little Sir in the snow like all the other moms I know. We did have a recording breaking amount of snow here in Dallas, which pretty much shut down the city.
One of the ways in which things were shut down was through huge power outages. We happened to be one of the areas affected. You would think since we live less than 5 miles from downtown Dallas (i.e., NOT a rural area in any way), our power would be restored fairly quickly. Add to that the fact that we live behind one of Dallas' premiere Assisted Living facilities, CC Young, and you would think our area would be prioritized. But no.
We did not have power for 46 hours.
WHAT?!
Yes that is correct, almost 2 full days.
Add to that the fact that Little Sir started running a low grade fever the day the snow started, so he wasn't feeling well enough to really appreciate the snow at all. I did take one video of me bringing him outside when the snow started (before the power went out).
Due to the age and (lack of) insulation in our house, when we lost power around 6PM on Thursday (in the middle of my work shift, yay), it started getting cold in the house quickly. We spent the first night with our friends the Mays, who were so kind to let us show up and stay with them even though they are in the process of moving and celebrating their son's first birthday at the same time. I was so thankful that Little Sir was relatively quiet that night and didn't wake his friend Jackson.
Friday morning our power still wasn't on and it turns out that my work was one of the only businesses that had decided they were not closing (why?!). We had gone home to see if the power was on but it was not, so we went to yet another friend's house to use their shower. Since our nanny couldn't make it and we had no power for me to work from home, we packed up Little Sir and brought him up to my office. Christian came along and we took turns taking care of him in my cube for the first 5 hours of my shift.
By 5PM it was clear that our power wasn't going to be on that night either so another couple in our community group introduced us to her parents (who also go to our church) who had a wonderful big room over their garage they let us stay in, and WiFi that allowed me to finish my work shift that evening.
I was so frustrated by then because Little Sir was more than a tad bit freaked out by all the moving around in addition to not feeling well in the first place, and my workload was actually pretty heavy for that evening. Our hosts, the "LC's" were so wonderfully kind, Christian and Little Sir spent time with them having fun while I worked. I was sad because I knew they were having so much fun downstairs while I had to work upstairs.
Oh, and did I mention it was my birthday? Yes, it was also my birthday but I could not enjoy the snow because I had to work, my child was sick, and we could not stay in our own home for the second night.
The LC's were so kind...Christian and our friends got a cake for me and brought me downstairs for a break and everyone sang Happy Birthday and I got to blow out my candles!
It was just the neatest thing to be loved on by our friends and their parents whom I did not even know before that night. There is a phrase that is used in our community: "Be the church". Despite how difficult the last few days have been with all the moving around from place to place, I feel like we really got the opportunity to experience what it is like for others to "be the church" toward us. Every one of the couples in our community group contributed in some way to helping us out when we were in need, and even the LC's, who we had never even known before this weekend. I hope that some day soon we get a chance to "be the church" in the same way toward someone else.
Thank you so much to the Mays, the Suttons, the Momary's, and the "LC's"!
Saturday we had scheduled a date night where (yet another) of our friends had offered to take care of Little Sir while we went out to celebrate my birthday/Valentine's. By this time, neither of us had really any clean, much less nice, clothing left, and we were very tired from all the moving around. But I was determined to keep this date night even if it was only going to be a 2 hour break!!
The best gift ever: on the way to our friends' house for the date night, I read on Facebook that someone else who lived near us got their power back. We called our house and the answering machine picked up - our power was back!!! We were so excited!!!
So that's where we've been. I am so grateful to be back in our warm house and so is Little Sir. We've assembled a new toy for him and we'll have pictures of it tomorrow!
I put that @ sign in there just to be nice. I don't really think he deserves it at this point.
You probably know who I mean - Dr. Weissbluth, MD, author of the famous "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" book that everyone drools over. Even our pediatrician told us to read this book the most recent time that I called her begging her to do something, anything, about how my child refuses to sleep (I call them about once a week asking this).
First of all, Dr. W is a fan of Cry It Out, which neither of us feel good about, no matter how hard we try. I'm not condemning anyone who is OK with it - I wish we could be, but we have tried and we just can't. Also, our child has never heard of it and he does not abide by it.
That is one of the first of the "facts about sleep" presented by Dr. Wiess@ss that Little Sir has completely disproven. I am so sleep deprived right now that I am getting angry at the doctor for even writing them down and giving me these false hopes. So here they are, a list of "sleep facts" that Little Sir has disproven:
Longer naps in the day time provides longer sleep at night. Yesterday (Monday) Little Sir took one of the longest naps of his life (excluding the first 2 days after he was born), which was 2.2 hours long. He then proceeded to wake up loudly every 1-2 hours all night long last night. He had done it the night before that as well, only that time he had some stretches of 3 hours or so. Oooo.
When a child learns to self-soothe to sleep, he will sleep through the night. We have never really had an issue with Little Sir falling asleep. From the very first time we put him alone in his crib, he just smiled up at us and fell right asleep. Nowadays he is more likely to talk to himself for 30 minutes or so, but he rarely actually cries when put down to sleep. It's the waking every 2-3-4 hours when the crying happens. According to the logic of the sleep books, if he can put himself to sleep he "should" be able to stay asleep. I wish!
A nap of less than one hour is not even real sleep. If this is true, Little Sir has probably only napped for real about 16 times since his birth (excluding the first 2 days after he was born).
Being sleep deprived creates a grumpy baby. Considering that, according to Dr. W, Little Sir has almost never had a real nap in his life and has never slept through the night, it seems odd that he is very cheerful and people tell us all the time what a happy baby he is. After a long night of not sleeping or a nap of 10 minutes (not a "real" nap, apparently), Little Sir always looks up at me and smiles like, "Well that was fun". I'm not saying he isn't twitchy and overly excitable from being overtired. I am just saying he's not grumpy about it.
Another thing that sucks is how all these sleep books I have read spend more than 50% of their pages going on and on about how horrible sleep deprivation is, how your child is going to grow up not being able to learn or reach milestones, and what a terrible parent you are if you don't let your child get enough sleep. This just makes me feel crappy. Like I am sitting around making my child stay awake. For the love of God, if I wanted him to stay awake like this all the time, why would I read all these completely unhelpful sleep books?? And who wants to get up constantly all night, every night anyway? Not me.
That is all for now on the sleep books. I have decided they are just making me paranoid.
We were having fun with the new built-in Photo Booth video options in the Snow Leopard version of Mac OS on my Macbook the other day, one of which is the ability to add automatic green-screen backgrounds.
I thought this one was especially appropriate considering the crazy ups and downs of sleeping Little Sir is bringing to us lately. And no, there's no sound until the end...
I bet you thought that "a week of videos" meant 7 days. Ha! Not to me, it doesn't. A week is what goes between weekends, my friend. Also, 5 is all that I could handle.
At the beginning of this week, we were back to the insanity of waking up every few hours at night and not napping during days. I called the pediatrician and begged them to tell me what was up. All they could think of was for me to read the book Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, which I had actually already checked out from the library but hadn't got a chance to read yet because I was wasting my time reading this book which I had checked out at the same time (and was completely not helpful).
The other suggestion from the pediatrician, as well as from the book, was to go ahead and move Little Sir's bedtime up to 8PM (he had been maintaining a 10PM bedtime) so that he can get more night sleep and therefore be less overtired during the day (which could be making it difficult for him to settle down and nap).
I made out this fabulous schedule where we would move the bedtime by 20 minutes every night and by something like 10 days we would be up to 8 PM. However the first two nights of that plan, Little Sir was waking up every single hour. By the second night, I was thinking we might as well just move it to 8PM and have it over with. The whole point of doing it gradually was so that this constant waking wouldn't happen, but if it was going to happen either way...let's just get this thing over with instead of stretching it out 10 days!
I wasn't sure if this was a good idea so I emailed all the moms I know to ask their opinion. I have a list of 36 moms who I know personally and they were kind enough to answer back with all kinds of great ideas and advice. You would think out of that many moms, there would be conflicting advice, but for the most part everyone agreed that moving the bedtime to 8PM right away was probably fine. Of course there were differences between everyone regarding whether to Cry It Out or soothe when he wakes up, but that is normal.
I just wanted to say a big "thank you" to everyone who emailed back. I am sure it was a combination of your advice and your prayers that has helped us sleep better the last few nights! We are really looking forward to seeing how well Little Sir does with more sleep!
This is funny because of all the times we said we would never let our child watch TV, and here he is, turning all the way around in the Bumbo to see some crazy ad for Lap Band surgery.
Here Little Sir accepts a toy from Pawpaw. He is getting good at grabbing things with his hands, even if he isn't sure what to do with them once he gets them...
Little Sir has really taken to growling a lot. Hopefully I will have more video of this later in the week, but here is a very brief close-up of his talking and growling. He likes to cuddle with this blanket on the couch with Daddy.
Day one in Week of Little Sir videos: Little Sir learning to grab a frog toy (from GramE and GrampE).
He gets really excited toward the end, but this was a week or so ago - nowadays he grabs all sorts of things and puts them into his mouth pretty quickly. This is a good video of when he first figured out how to do it!
book that everyone drools over. Even our pediatrician told us to read this book the most recent time that I called her begging her to do something, anything, about how my child refuses to sleep (I call them about once a week asking this).