The Art of the Gradual Transition

I've discovered that the only constant in parenting is change. Babies (and their routines) are constantly growing, developing, evolving... just when you think you've got something good going, everything gets flipped upside down! This constant flux makes it very difficult to ever settle into your own routine. Your sleep routine is constantly changing, nap times are always shifting around, the kinds of toys and activities that once entertained them suddenly become obsolete, and you're left wondering how in the heck you're ever supposed to settle into any kind of normal, predictable pattern (like anything remotely resembling your old life!). I find myself in a perpetual state of "figuring [something] out", whether it's what the heck does he want from me right now?! or how do I get him to take a bottle again, and why the heck did he suddenly decide they're poison?! or how is it that he can quietly soothe himself right back to sleep at nap time, but cries every stinking time he wakes up at night?! I suppose it has a lot to do with the stage we're in right now, but it just seems like we're always "working on [something]". It can be exhausting at times.

It's exhausting for many obvious reasons. First of all, when your child is establishing routines and habits and making strong associations, you feel like you really have to watch yourself. You don't want to set any bad precedents and train your baby into "bad habits". Whether it's a habit that could ultimately be bad for your baby himself, or a habit that just makes your life more difficult, you've got to do what you can to avoid setting yourself up for difficulty down the road. The tricky part is that babies don't come with instructions, and sometimes you just don't realize that you're making trouble for yourself. Other times you know darn well, but you're just too tired to care! Sometimes you just let them win, and quietly reassure yourself that tomorrow is another day. There's plenty of guilt in that outcome, but that's parenting for ya. Exhaustion with a side of frustration, peppered with guilt, and served on a big heaping pile of the purest, sweetest joy you've ever known. 

It's also exhausting because you convince yourself that if you break it down into small enough steps, your baby won't even notice that you're trying to completely up-end some aspect of his little world. You design these elaborate schemes for getting from Point A to Point B, which end up mostly going to pot, or being postponed and modified and scaled up and scaled down and spun around until they're just remnants of their former selves! We're working on several of these "gradual transitions" ourselves...

• Sleeping through the night. We used to be great at this one! A few weeks ago we were getting up to nurse every hour and a half to two hours. Now we've successfully cut out the nursing, but we're still waking up every two or three hours. It turned out that he wasn't actually hungry, he just needed some help getting back to sleep. I jumped to the conclusion that he was awake because he was hungry, but it turned out that if I got up and walked around with him for a few minutes he'd fall right back to sleep. Sometimes I had to walk and bounce and rock for a good twenty minutes before he'd go back to sleep, but before long all I had to do was sit up in bed and pick him up and he would almost immediately lay his head on my shoulder and drift off to sleep. Now he will sometimes soothe himself back to sleep in his bassinet with my help (I hold his hand near his mouth for a few minutes so that he can find some fingers to suck on), but other times I still end up having to pick him up. The hours between 2 and 3am are usually the worst for this. He'll fall back asleep with my help, but he won't stay asleep. If I've gotten him to fall back to sleep in his bassinet, he'll be awake again within 5 or 10 minutes. If I've picked him up and let him fall asleep on my chest, I usually can't even lay him back down without his eyes popping wide open, and the fussing ensues all over again. I have laid there next to the bassinet holding his fingers or a pacifier (which he rarely takes anymore) in his mouth for every bit of 20 and 30 minutes sometimes, trying to hold off on picking him up. Somehow, during this 2-3am stint, he just about always wins. I haven't had to resort to nursing him back to sleep, but he just will not stay asleep during that time frame and rarely falls asleep at all without me picking him up. Eventually - and I have no idea what's different that causes this - he just falls asleep and stays asleep. It's usually after about 45 minutes to an hour of this back and forth madness. I just really don't know how to move past this road block!

• The next is instituting a two-nap schedule. On this point, I've had much more success. He almost always cat-napped in the mornings and then took a long afternoon nap in his swing. I tried laying him in his bassinet for a mid-morning nap around 11 (or whenever he got sleepy around that time of day) for about a week straight, but he would never stay asleep in there for more than 30 minutes. EVER. Sometimes I could get him to go back to sleep, sometimes I couldn't, but never for any more than a second 30-minute stint. There must be something about his sleep cycle... it's 30 minutes, on the dot, EVERY time I lay him in his bassinet to nap during the day. So eventually I decided to just put him in his swing when he started to act sleepy sometime between 11 and noon every day just to establish it as a nap time, since I knew he'd sleep better in there. That was the key - it only took a few days until we had added an (at least) hour-and-a-half-long nap in the late morning. The next step is...

• Napping in the crib (and ultimately sleeping there at night, though that's still a ways off I think). As aforementioned, we have tried to have him nap in his bassinet as an intermediate step along the way toward reaching this goal, but that hasn't gone so well. About a week ago I decided to move the swing upstairs to our bedroom. I thought that perhaps  he was having a hard time napping in the quiet, isolated bedroom because he had grown accustomed to napping on the main floor with plenty of background noise and the smell of mommy nearby. Apparently the surrounding environment wasn't the problem, because he has had no trouble sleeping up there in his swing. I have always been rather perplexed as to why he seems to need the motion of the swing to nap well during the day, when he obviously doesn't seem to "need" it at night. Well, as it turns out, apparently it wasn't the motion of the swing either - the batteries ran out the other day and he stayed asleep just fine! It starts out swinging and dies about a half hour into his nap, so I've just been letting it go and he has been napping normally. Today I just never even started it swinging - he slept in there motionless and did great! He even woke up at one point and put himself back to sleep! I was quite impressed. So it has been a gradual process of narrowing down what it is that he seems to "need", or maybe he is just gradually learning to nap without whatever it is that he "needed". The next step is to see if he'll nap laying down versus sitting up - that's all that's separating the swing from the bassinet at this point! What's my strategy? I'm thinking of having him sleep sitting up motionless in the swing for a few more days just to ensure that we're over the motion thing, and then try propping him with the boppy pillow in his bassinet. Maybe if he's semi-upright he won't notice the difference...? We shall see. Then it'll just be a matter of removing that last crutch (the boppy) and, Voila! We're napping in the bassinet. See what I mean by elaborate schemes? Oye.

• Last but certainly not least frustrating is the Battle of the Bottle. Little man always took a bottle like a champ up until about a month ago. He'd even let Daddy feed him his last meal of the night and put him to bed! He took bottles from me, from Daddy, and even from friends of ours once or twice. Then one day, he apparently just decided he'd had enough of that. Now he purses his lips, shakes his head, ducks away, screeches, and generally employs any and all tactics at his disposal for avoiding the dreaded plastic nipple. We switched to a more breast-like nipple (the Tommee Tippee) at the suggestion of several friends, but so far it hasn't even put a dent in his resolve. We've been offering a bottle once a day for over a week now, and I'm about to step it up to twice (maybe once with me during the day and once with Daddy in the evening...?). I know that Daddy is probably the best person to start with, since he associates me with nursing, but I'm home with him so much that it's just convenient for me to give it a try too. Maybe I should just have Daddy do it for a while... Anyway, we've been offering it at between-meal times, so that he's not already hungry and cranky but also not full from a recent feeding. I'm also trying not to put myself in a position where he's legitimately hungry so that I'm forced to nurse him right after he rejects the bottle, because I don't want him to associate the rejection of the bottle with the reward of nursing. It's all quite tricky, to say the least. Why is this a such pivotal point for a SAHM, you might ask? I have to start doing some shadowing in the hospital for my "independent study" credits, which will require me to be away from home for several hours at a time. He's gonna get hungry, and he's gonna have to take a bottle, and I'd rather it not be out of sheer necessity and after a long, hard battle with whomever is watching him! We really need to climb back up on the bottle wagon before my first shadowing session. 

So, long story not-so-short (as usual), we've been awful busy around here! But despite the little battles we've got going on, there has been no shortage of fun times and general adorableness...

Often heard 'round these parts: "Good thing he's so darn cute" ;-)