Eight Months!

Jude is eight months old now. Hmmm. What is he doing these days? Let me think.

More stuff that makes me want to pass out with cute overload. Of course.

He laughs spontaneously all the time. He even stopped nursing the other day just to look up at me and laugh for no reason (Dad K and Mom L witnessed this - it was grand). I have a small collection of ridiculous faces that I make at him. They put him into hysterics, especially if I'm making them at him from further away. He thinks people are funnier if they're far away.

He is sitting up on his own, and I can leave the room without worrying he'll fall over and bump his head (though I still set him down a nice distance from hard/sharp objects).

He is eating everything. Barley, brown rice and oat cereals. Sweet potato, peas, green beans, carrots, pumpkin & zucchini. Plums, prunes, blueberries, apples, peaches, pears, banana & avocado. I just introduced whole-milk yogurt (plain) and egg yolk (not a fan of that yet). The only things I have left to "introduce" are wheat, cheese, meat, cow's milk, honey, citrus fruits and non-green beans. Some of that is nixed until his first birthday (cow's milk and honey), along with sugar. No teeth yet.

He acts self-conscious, and occasionally shows off when he knows we're looking. He'll be playing with a toy by himself, and he'll notice he's being watched. He then gets a tiny smirk on his face (almost undetectable) and looks quickly back at his toy. He can't help but check every three seconds if you're still looking, but he tries to "act busy" while he's doing it. The old "I don't care if you're watching me or not, because I'm completely absorbed in this activity" routine. Not very convincing.

He makes a wider range of noises, including one that sounds like he's gagging. That one's his favorite actually. Nice.

He's good at playing by himself now. He can entertain himself for 30 - 40 minutes at a time.

When he's exploring something, he holds it in one hand and pokes at it with the other. He hasn't gotten the hang of the old thumb/index finger pincer skill yet, so he fans out his fingers and taps gently at something like he's playing the piano. We call it "twiddling". He especially enjoys twiddling the propeller on his toy airplane.



He imitates us... including noises we make like the "lip-popping kissy sound" (hard to describe), the "pbthhhh" sound he's been loving for awhile, and that grunting/gagging sound I described earlier (we imitate him with that one, not the other way around). He also loves to shake his head back and forth in a "no" motion, and when we do it back he is thrilled. This can go on for quite some time.

He loves to play peek-a-boo, especially if we hide behind a door frame and peek out at him from further away. We try to make the "a-boo" sound scary because he likes it better that way. He's also becoming a fan of "sooooo big", and is just starting to lift his arms a little bit when we say it.

He finally got sick :( Just a few days ago he had his first runny nose and fever. We recently left him in the nursery at church for the first time. Bingo.

He is obsessed with cars going by. When we're out on the front porch and he hears one coming, he's starts going ballistic in my arms: body stiffened, legs kicking, arms waving, heading turning back and forth frantically to see where it is. As it passes he follows it with his gaze until it's out of sight.

Best of all, he leans toward someone when he wants them to hold him. He's just starting to reach for people too, mostly me in the middle of the night, which I love. I'm not being sarcastic - I could do without the 1am (and 4am) feeding(s) he's still demanding, but when he reaches for me, what can I do? I'm putty.

Honestly, I was unaware that babies were so hilarious before I had Jude. He cracks me up all day every day. I wasn't much of a baby person before I had him, and now I'm wondering what the heck my problem was. It doesn't get much better than a miniature human being covered in a nice layer of chub doing miniature things all day. I mean, come on.

P.S. I wrote most of this post a few days ago, so here's a recent development. Jude officially slept through the night for the first time last night -- right on the day he turned 8 months old. I'm so excited I can't stand it. I feel like calling everyone I know. Every once in awhile I think of it again and get a shiver of disbelief down my spine. I will function as a normal, fully-awake human being again.

Six Months!

I love this pic I took of Jude and Jono yesterday. Jude is six months old today. Can you believe it? He's like, a real baby now.

Here's an update on his latest habits and activities.

First off, he has graduated from the 30-minute nap and is taking longer daytime snoozes now. Like, over an hour, and sometimes two. I'm getting so much done, it's obscene. I used to struggle weekly to log my 10 hours of paid labor, but now it's a real cinch. Thanks Jude. Mama loves you.

He also knows how to whine now. It's kind of a grating, sustained grunt/squeal, and he uses it to tell us he is not pleased with whatever we're doing. Like anything that involves touching him for a practical purpose, such as strapping him into the car seat, putting his hoodie on, etc.

He makes a range of noises, and when he discovers a new one he makes that same noise obsessively for days until the novelty wears off. He also responds to humor, but our funniness eventually gets old to him and we have to think of something else. Like last week he laughed his butt off every time I put my face close to his and sang "Strangers in the Night" in a sultry baritone voice.

Dooby-dooby dooooo (strangers in the night)... exchanging glances, lovers in the night...

It worked about five times and after that he was completely straight-faced and looked at me like, "Not funny anymore. Move on."

AND...he's eating solids. We made it to six months exclusively on breast milk! He gets two solid meals a day now: rice cereal in the morning and oat cereal at night, with nursing in between. In a week or two we'll start him on pureed veggies, and next month we'll introduce fruit. At his first feeding (well, really his second, but it had been a long time since that 4.5 month attempt) he learned pretty quickly what was on the spoon we were pointing at him, and he lifted his head and opened his mouth for each bit like a baby bird. Now that it's been a few days he's less passive about it and grabs for the spoon or his bib and sucks the spilled cereal off of it. He loves the stuff.

Jude has a bedtime routine now. It goes like this:

Oat cereal
Warm bath (soap occasionally)
Put on night-time diaper and PJs
Read books
Nurse
Sing/rock
Sleep

I was thinking that solids might help him sleep better at night, because most of the people I talked to about it said it had helped their babies. But the first few nights he was still waking three to five times on average, sometimes to eat, but just as often I think because he's trying to poo or what have you. Maybe he's a little cold sometimes in our drafty old house; I don't know. The past two nights he has only woken twice (to eat), so that's progress. The prospect of just one 2 am feeding makes me giddy. Someday...

My friend Lori made me feel better when she told me that her babies didn't sleep very well at night until 8 or 9 months. She also wondered if mothers have some sort of hormone going through us during this time in our lives that keeps up functioning despite the lack of sleep. She pointed out that now that her kids are out of that stage, she's back to being a zombie if she gets anything less than 8 hours a night. She has a point. Most days I feel great and operate just fine despite everything. There are some days I may even fall in the category of "high-functioning". Whatever it is, it's a miracle.

Every kid is different and how you feel about the habits of yours on any given day is highly relative. I'm so used to Jude's waking patterns that it usually doesn't bother me much, but then you hear from some chick whose four-month-old is waking only once a night and you start to feel a little jealous. I was on a mom's Q & A website recently and some silly woman posted the following:

"My baby is four months old and is STILL waking up for a 2 am feeding every night. Help!!"

Yeah lady, we all feel bad for you. (Someone needs to slap her.) Honestly if Jude had been sleeping through the night already at that age I'd be worried he was getting enough to eat. The gazillion comments to this woman's post were quite amusing. Most of them were along the lines of "Are you kidding me? Get over it!" Hee hee.

I need to commend Jude for something that I think he is doing great with. A few weeks ago we decided to see if he could learn to go down for naps and bedtime on his own. (Normally I would nurse or rock him to sleep.) He fussed a bit the first few days, but now I can put him in his crib drowsy but wide awake and he doesn't make a peep. When I go back to check on him a few minutes later he is sound asleep. He'll also wake up in the morning and play by himself in his crib for 20 minutes or so, and I get to sleep a while longer. Wunderkind I tell you.

So that's the latest on Doobers, as Jono called him the other night (I think it's because we've been singing "Dooby Dooby Doo...").

Things Have Changed...

...everyone else is on vacation in warm places and you're excited that your husband offered to take the baby for most of a Saturday so you could organize the basement.

...nothing fills you with more glee than when your kiddo goes down for a morning nap so you can run around like a chicken with its head cut off "getting things done" for an average of 30 savory minutes.

...your hubs gets home from work and your heart literally jumps out of your chest with excitement that you'll get to hand the babe off to him when he walks in the door -- then falls somewhere below your knees when you realize he's decided to split wood for 30 minutes in the backyard instead of coming in.

...said hubs becomes unsettled when he notices wife and babe are plastered against the sliding glass door boring four holes into the back of his head as he splits said wood, and he feels a wee bit of pressure to make his way into the house sooner rather than later.

...you still can't believe how big your boobs are, and have to keep reminding yourself that they will eventually go away.

... you forget to wear a tank top under some of your favorite pre-baby shirts, and notice later that the buttons around your bust-line are about to pop open. The gaps between each one are so big pretty much everyone can see your son's lunch buffet area.

...what you consider quality "alone time" becomes the ten minutes you spend in the shower with the babe in an infant seat outside the shower curtain. Whom you must soothe every 30 seconds by keeping the curtain partially open so he can see what you're doing.

..."reading a book" becomes the 20 seconds in bed before you pass out like a drunken sailor.

...you must now use the bathroom in the company of another tiny person who is lying on the bathroom rug staring at you.

...you use morning nap time to write a blog post instead of working and feel extremely guilty about it.

...your husband's asthmatic night-time breathing sounds exactly like the beginnings of a baby fussing in the next room and you can't stop yourself from tensing up every 3 seconds because of it.

... even though the bod isn't what is used to be, you figure you can still get away with wearing your two-piece swimsuit this summer. People will lend you a little grace when they see you on the beach with the baby you recently pushed out of it.

...your prayer life has gone significantly downhill as it now revolves around asking God to put your baby into an 8-hour stupor for the night.

...it seems whenever you sit down to nurse, the phone rings, the dog whines to be let out and someone knocks on the door, and you're completely paralyzed by the indecision of which need to address first.

...you are blinded by a huge wave of jealousy when another new mom "can't believe how long my baby's naps are".

...you can't believe this chubby, bald, two-foot tall creature is part of you and always will be, and the love you have for him is sometimes terrifying because of all the things that could happen to him.

...you don't know how it's possible that this is the most work, time, and love you've ever lavished on anything, you've never been more exhausted in your life, and yet there are moments where you feel deliriously happy about it.

... your shower looks like a sasquatch was in there last. There's a lot of post-partum hair coming out of your head, and you figure it's only a matter of time until you look like Demi Moore in G.I. Jane.

... an hour after the babe goes to bed for the night, you miss him already, and must go in to stare at his fat little sleeping face.

Cluster Feeding!

As of last night I am a HUGE fan of cluster feeding before bed. It's a tip I got from someone at church and I'm hoping it keeps working. Last night I fed Jude three times in the three hours leading up to bed time, rather than the usual once-every-three-hours routine. Jono put him down to sleep after the last feeding, and not only did he not wake up once in the first hour, but he slept for six hours straight after that. Ha ha!!! Please God, let it continue. (I'm not using His name in vain there. I've been praying about this for weeks.)

Sure, he wouldn't really go to sleep again after that unless I took him in bed with me, but I'll take my small victories where I can. I slept for four hours straight last night. Woot!

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

So...as you may have guessed from the title of this post, Jude moved into a crib in his own room recently. We took the plunge two weeks ago. It's been the hardest thing I've done since he was born.

Until we moved him, Jude had fantastic sleeping habits for his age. As a newborn we had him sleep in our room in his carseat. We'd gotten the tip from friends, who said it had worked well for their newborn, and we could tell he liked being propped up slightly and surrounded by the wooly lining. (Since then we've learned of some risks with letting newborns sleep for long periods in their carseats, so we don't recommend it.) From his first week on he routinely slept six hours straight in that thing and I only had to get up once a night to feed him.

I knew I had to transition him, and soon. You can't have a five-year old putting his footy pajamas on and squeezing himself into an infant carseat before getting up for kindergarten the next morning. Our carseat friends had told us it took them only one sleepless night to transition their son. That sounded easy enough. I thought, "I can swing that."

Like I knew what I was talking about.

Two weeks later, I'll just say our son is a bit more stubborn than this other saintly child. (No halo around Jude's little head - although the hair sticking up on top is better than a halo in my opinion. But that's beside the point.) We can't believe how little sleep he can run on. We keep reading that at this age babies tend to sleep 15 hours a day. Jude? Try eight. On a good day. Parenting books are no help in this department. They gleefully report things like: "Babies sleep all day and all night and only wake up to eat or have their diaper changed!!" Ha ha. That's great.

During the first week he went down pretty easily and would usually sleep for a two-hour block, during which I would go to bed. This sounds quaint so far. But within the first 30 minutes of my head hitting the pillow I could expect to be up again. This was followed by four or five hours of waking every 15 - 30 minutes. All...night....long. By 6:00 am I would finally cave and bring him into bed with us. He would sleep like a brick then.

On the fifth night or so of this we tried letting him "cry it out" on advice I'd heard from parents who'd reached the end of their rope, but I could only last five minutes. It was pathetic hearing a little baby get more and more upset, and I couldn't handle it. When Jono went to get him finally his crib sheets were wet. From his tears :(

So we tried everything else we could think of. Making his room nice and warm with an oil heater. White noise from the humidifier. Soft music playing. A crib mobile. Complete darkness. Feeding every three hours through the night. Hovering over him in his crib rather than picking him up to soothe him so he wouldn't be so dependent on us for sleep. Nothing was working.

I called my mom. I was hesitant and afraid, but she juiced me up. It was just what I needed to do what had to be done. I HAD TO LET HIM CRY.

I was thinking he was too young to "cry it out', and some claim an infant can't self-soothe, but I was a desperate zombie by this point and was willing to try it. He needed to learn to go back to sleep without me hovering over him every 15 minutes. Mom said, "It's the best thing for both of you. No one is sleeping, and it isn't good for you or for Jude." Jono said, "Em, we need to do a little 'detachment parenting'."

So I tried it. This sounds terrible (I can't believe I did it), but I let him cry for over an hour two different times throughout the night. I made sure that he'd recently been fed when I did this so that he wasn't crying from hunger. I actually managed to sleep through most of it, which shows how bone-tired I was. He eventually went to sleep on his own after the second crying jag, which was the point. Man, he is stubborn.

When I went to him in the morning I was terrified he would resent me for doing this. Had I messed up my best efforts so far at healthy attachment? Did his stress levels rise so high from crying so long that he now had emotional damage? (I read something about that in an attachment parenting magazine!) Were some of those AP people out to lunch on some of these things, or was I?

As I snuck up on him in his crib, I saw that he was awake and playing by himself. He was sucking on his fists, staring at his mobile, and making adorable sounds. After watching for awhile I picked him up. Jono came in and offered to change his diaper (read: good marriage choice). I watched him getting his bum wiped on his changing table, as I often do, because he is so happy and cute when getting his diaper changed. I caught his eye once and silently begged forgiveness. He gave me a big smile. No hard feelings Mom.

Since that night he's gotten into a pattern of waking and feeding every two to three hours, and I still bring him into bed with us for his last night-time feeding around 6am. This is still a lot of waking for an 11-week-old, but it's so much better than it was last week. Now we can try some other, less traumatic tactics for getting him to sleep for longer periods as he gets older. I have no real expectations for him to "sleep through the night" right now. I suppose he'll get there when he's ready.

Even though it was effective, I still feel guilty about the night I let him cry. The next day his voice was scratchy, and it still hasn't come back all the way. This makes me feel worse. Yesterday he opened his mouth to coo at me, and he thought he was making a sound, but he wasn't :( Today I noticed the coo was back. It's one of the best sounds in the world.

Tough love starts early I guess. Here's to second guessing myself for the rest of my life.

Sorry about the novel. I haven't actually been writing much, so maybe it's okay that I just posted a mini manifesto on a baby's sleeping habits. Out of necessity, I'm a little obsessed right now.