(A note of caution: while looking up info on your baby's development, don't click on any link that mentions SIDS, because you'll spend twenty minutes reading stories from mothers about vaccines and SIDS and then the next twenty minutes bawling about them, while checking on your baby thirty times in the process. Amen.)
He did it.
Last night Wyatt slept from 11 pm to 6 am. 7 beautiful uninterrupted hours of sleep. Not only that, but after I fed him he went back to sleep until 9 (mostly...with a few interruptions from Dad...). I had absolutely no idea what to do with myself. I laid back down and didn't fall back asleep until nearly 7, completely energized after getting so many hours of sleep at once. It was amazing. And wonderful. And fabulous. There's no way I was expecting that, not after sleeping in the car all day yesterday, and I credit it completely to the swaddling blanket I put him in last night, having left them all at home while we were in Utah. I decided to give it a try last night, and POOF! SLEEP! I'm hoping this is the start of a pattern, and not just some fluke.
Looking back, I am amazed at how much Wyatt has changed in a month, I should have been doing these more often. Not only has he grown a lot, but he's become much more aware of his surroundings. He grins all the time now, and I love nothing more than to sit with him and listen to him coo and babble. He's trying out his voice and comes up with all sorts of different sounds and he always seems quite pleased with himself.
He is still a cuddler and now that I'm back home without three or four people fighting to hold him, my list of accomplished tasks in the day is no doubt going to diminish. It's been a struggle today trying to do laundry and put away everything from the past three weeks (never mind that we still have a huge box being shipped here with everything from Christmas...) while trying to keep him asleep. It probably doesn't help that I'm trying to get him used to napping in his crib, he keeps waking up and so I keep running in to "put in his plug", a lovely description courtesy of my grandpa. For the past three weeks he's napped either in someone's arms or in his carseat, and so his crib is a new concept. It also doesn't help that our walls and windows are paper thin, and our normally very quiet neighborhood seems to have morphed into a construction site. For some reason there seems to be a dump truck three houses down making all sorts of crashing and beeping noises, someone is running a leaf blower, and the kids are getting out of school and find it quite amusing to walk as slowly as possible while screaming the words to "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid. I've squelched the urge to run outside and scream at all of them to please KEEP IT DOWN, THE BABY IS TRYING TO SLEEP no less than three times.
He's still eating every three to four hours, but has started to cluster feed in the late evening before finally going to bed. He'll eat around 6ish, 8, 10, and then again at midnight (or such were the hours in Utah...) before finally deciding to sleep for several hours. It's funny that you can go so long before finally figuring things like this out. We thought that he was just generally fussier in the evening, and then a few days after we'd been home my mom suggested I feed him again even though it had only been two hours. I think that's a lesson I've definitely learned, that you can't be too rigid with your "schedule". You've got to listen and pay attention to your baby and his needs, and sometimes those needs change constantly. What worked last night doesn't necessarily work tonight, and that's okay. If he's happy, I'm happy.
(Seriously people, I think someone is sawing down a tree or something. This is ridiculous.)
(Also, enough with the motorcycles! We are not on a busy street!)
(telling me all about the crazy dream he had...)
He rarely cries. He fusses when he's hungry and when he's tired, but he doesn't cry. The sound he makes is more of a protest than anything. My family kept trying to come up with what it sounded like, my mom said it was like a cat's meow. It almost sounds like he's faking it, a very pitiful, "Aha, aha". He did really cry once. The second time I clipped his nails he jerked his second finger and I clipped his skin a bit. It didn't bleed, but he cried, hard, and so did I. Thankfully I haven't heard him cry like that, not before or since. It's heartbreaking to see those big tears and that bottom lip stuck out, and I always thought myself to be a "let them cry it out" sort of person. I'm not so sure now. The sound is gut wrenching.
(Okay, are they GRINDING the sidewalk up?!? Seriously, my floor is vibrating.)
(already worn out on New Years Eve)
(People, they are jack hammering. I'm not kidding.)
His little downy hair fell out, as most newborns do, but only halfway. For weeks he was left with just the hair halfway down his head to his neck. He looked like a grandpa. It wasn't until the last two weeks that it started to grow back in.
(you can really see the soft spot in this, and where his bones haven't quite fused yet)
(Sleepy? I'm not sleepy...)
The last two weeks I've stuck to a bedtime routine, and it's working very well. In between the last feeding of the night we give him a bath and rub his little body down with lotion. Then Caleb watches him while I get ready for bed, a hurried event since by then he is not only tired but getting hungry. After I feed him we bundle him up and he goes right to sleep. Usually. He loves his baths, if he was fussy before he calms right down and lays there, eyes wide open, as we pour the warm water over his belly.
We'd been bathing him in the sink downstairs at my parents house, and when we returned home we did so that night as well in our kitchen. Except that he's grown just a little bit since he was last bathed there, and our sink is smaller than my parents. Last night we moved him to the tub and used the baby tub we bought. It folds up (necessary in our tiny house) and keeps him mostly upright, but I'm not sure I liked it, it was harder to bathe him. It was also harder to control the water temperature, and before Caleb handed him over to me I had to play the warmer / colder game which took a bit of time, meaning more naked-boy-baby-time, which is always a gamble. Thankfully we had no accidents.
Which reminds me.
One of the last days at home I was changing him in the morning and had his legs up in the air as I was wiping his flat little bum. I suddenly heard a thudding noise and looked up to see an arc of pee landing squarely between his eyes. I squealed and lowered his legs, soaking his new outfit in the process before he stopped. We both sat there a moment, me trying to figure out what to do first, him blinking rapidly at his newly soaked face. Thankfully it's sterile, right?
He's starting to discover his hands, or really, just that there's something attached to him that could possibly replace the binki. He hasn't chosen a finger yet, no, he'd rather just shove it all in.
He also has a preference for where his hands are while feeding, and that's fist shoved in between my breasts. If we're out in public and that's not possible, he doesn't seem to know what to do and ends up roaming around, finally grasping and pulling down my shirt collar.
We saw a lot of people at home, introducing Wyatt to our friends and family, and the most asked question was if I was enjoying motherhood. This is one question I don't have to think about. I love this. It's not easy, it's work and can be tiring, but it's a good work. A good tired. And I love it.
