For the first 4 week, Jaden has been eating and sleeping whenever he wants, he has a shirt that says "I may be small but I'm in charge" and he wears it with power and authority. He has run the show around here, but because I am going back to work in a few weeks, Kyle and I have started the fun adventure of sleep training. In a perfect world, jaden would start his day at 7am, then stay awake for 1.5 hours, take a nap and eat again at 10. We would do this on repeat of eat, awake, nap until 10pm where we would cut out the 1.5 hours of wake time and put him back to sleep only to wake every 3 hours to eat and then back to sleep until 7am.
That is life in a perfect world, in the training world, keeping Jaden awake for 1.5 hours has proven to be quite the task. We take a bath, take trips to target, stroll around the block, tummy time on the mat, go to every room and check out the ceiling fans...this kid is very aware and wants to take in everything. When he is bored and ready to move to the next activity he gives a little whimper and we are off to the circus. The problem has become after he feeds making sure he doesn't go back to sleep, but once he has awaken and has had all that fun, he will remain wide awake during nap time. It takes ever rock, bounce and sway to finally get this kid to sleep. We were told the swing is the key to rocking a kid to sleep, so we borrowed a really nice swing from our friend. Jaden will rock in the swing looking at the mobile and ceiling fan, wide awake. I can tell he is tired, but he fights sleep constantly. We finally got a sound machine and this thing has been a life savor...combo his rock-n-play and white noise and we have ourselves a party! I have been rocking him to sleep on a few naps and one thing I love is that this kid definitely belongs to me...this evening I was rocking him while talking with my friend Lisa on the phone. Anytime Lisa and I get together it is almost guaranteed that someone tells us we are too loud and we need to quiet down. We were talking about her upcoming wedding plans so you can imagine excitement + our normal loud voices = escalated volume! Not only did my son not flinch at the level of "excitement" but my son fell asleep and slept through the whole conversation...whoo hoo finally a buddy to be on my side of the whole "you are too loud" debacle!!
Anyways all this training seems to be working, because as of yesterday he was sleeping 4.5 hours straight at night. The first time he did this, I woke up at the 3 hour mark ready to feed and he was sound asleep, I was worried he was sitting there starving so I watched him for the next hour, and finally at the first sign of movement, I scooped him up to save my poor extremely hungry and malnourished 12 pound son. He lazily woke up, ate without a fuss and went back to bed. I recognize now that I over reacted and have relaxed a little these last couple of nights. Now I am thinking a couple more days of this and we might be dropping that midnight feeding and sleeping on through the night..yippee!! Here are a few photos of our sleep and awake adventures
Sleeping through the patriots game
Checking out the world from his changing table, his favorite place to sit and wonder about the deep things of theworld
He belongs in this loud family!! Gosh, I love him!!
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