How Things Have Been Going

Baby Boy is sleeping MUCH better since we gave him a chance to learn how to soothe himself back to sleep. He's taken to sucking on his fingers quite a bit, as you can see in the johnny-jump-up picture below. I am amazed at how long he naps now. Before, his naps in the crib were 20-40 minutes long; now they're more like 1 1/2-2 hours. And if he wakes up at night, he just sucks on his fingers or his lovey for a few minutes and conks out again.

Now the problem I'm having is that I still can't sleep at night, even though Baby Boy is doing great. This morning, I woke up when Baby Boy fussed a bit around 1 A.M. because his diaper was very wet. I changed it and he fell right back to sleep. Unfortunately, I could not go back to sleep at that point, even though I'd only had 2 1/2 hours of sleep, so I've been up ever since. I've been mostly going on adrenaline for the last 4 months, so I think my body just needs to learn how to sleep again.

Baby Boy definitely misses his pacifier, although I think his longing for it is subsiding as he gets more adept at getting his fingers positioned the way he wants them in his mouth.

Something strange that I was not anticipating in all this is that Baby Boy at first started nursing much less. For a couple days, he would take only one breast at a feeding session, and only for a few minutes. I was beginning to get concerned that he wasn't getting enough, so I did some research and found that a baby can develop trouble nursing if his time with mama decreases rapidly. I had been holding or laying down with Baby Boy for all of his naps, and then I went abruptly to putting him in the crib for every nap. I think it was just too much all at once for him, and fighting nursing was his way of telling me something was wrong. So I've been careful to spend extra cuddle time with him when he is awake and to take a couple of naps with him. Now his nursing is better than ever. This afternoon, he nursed for 40 minutes straight. Poor little dear. So many changes in his little world, but in the long run, they are in his best interest.

I realized today that I really need to update my blogroll and reading list. I will work on that when I have a chance.

Edited to add:

Hi luvs2bmommy,

Thank you for your concern and for taking the time to join Blogger and leave me your comments.

Baby Boy has actually never nursed only 5 times in one day. The count was at 5 when I was writing that post, but I woke him later that night to give him another feeding. I'm trying to stay loosely on a 6:30-9:30-12:30-3:30-6:30-10:00 schedule, but it's not rigid, especially if I felt that Baby Boy did not get enough at a particular nursing session. If that's the case, I usually feed him again about an hour later.

This morning, I fed him at 6:30 as usual. When I was getting ready to put him down for a nap at 8:00, he was acting hungry, so I went ahead and nursed him to sleep and put him in his crib.

For the most part, I enjoyed having Baby Boy in our bed for the first few months, but now, we wake each other up and neither one of us gets good sleep, so it's better for him to be in the crib now.

As for pumping, I did it for the first couple of nights when Baby Boy started going longer without nursing, but even then, I only pumped out a couple of ounces to take the edge off the discomfort of my poor engorged breasts. They have adjusted now.

All this to say that in real life, I am still more flexible and paying attention to Baby Boy's cues than maybe it sounded like I was in my posts. I admit, it is sometimes difficult to know what to do when there is so much conflicting information out there.