David turned five months old yesterday. I know it’s pathetic that I haven’t updated in nine days after saying I wanted to update more often but we’ve had a long and difficult week. Mostly cause mom has lost her mind.
Last Saturday, I was online surfing about sleeping issues and came across the Baby Whisperer book. Something rang true so I went out and bought it right away. And proceeded to implement it. For those of you who are unfamilair with it, it goes something like this: You put the baby on an EASY schedule. He eats, plays (Activity) and then sleeps so you get some You time. (Eat, Activity, Sleep, You). You feed the baby every 3 hours. (or four if he’s over four months old). Anyhow the idea is to teach the baby to self-soothe. What you do is you put him in the crib and then if he cries, you pick him up and when he calms you put him down. You do this as long as it takes.
Our first night went badly. He was up from 1-3 and then from 5-7. The book said the first night would be hard so I persevered. The second night was perfect. He slept all the way from 8 to 5am. I dream-fed him and he never woke up. I felt great! I was sure it was working. I had finally found something that worked.
Riiiiiighhhtttt.
Come day four, David won’t go to bed without crying in my arms or in his crib with me wrapped all over him. He wakes up four times a night. Sometimes for an hour, crying. At least for an hour. Today, day six, he was so bad that he would start stiffening and wailing as soon as we entered the bedroom. While Jake was putting him down and picking him up, he explained to me that this was no different from crying it out. I yelled at him and got mad but eventually admitted that he was right. As soon as I admitted it, I completely relaxed. I’d been stressing all week from hearing him cry and feeling like shit about it. Now I didn’t have to any more.
I took my son out for a walk and then at bedtime, I sat with him for thirty minutes while rubbed his belly, his head, his tummy and whatever else he needed to sleep. He fell asleep peacefully and has now been sleeping for 1.5hrs without a stir. I will NEVER do that to my kid again. If he wakes up seventeen times a night until he’s a teenager so be it. That’s what it means to have a kid, right? What’s the point in having them if I am going to complain that he’s inconvenient.
I feel much better now and I am a lot more relaxed. I love my son and I am so so lucky that he’s the smiliest and easiest boy in the world. Any other kid would have hated me for what I put him through in the last week. But my amazing son continued to smile at me and laugh when I kissed him.
Happy Five Months, David, I love you with all my heart.
hello, david is sweet:)
but can i ask you something? i see now the picture of aksel’s in spite of the old pictures. who is aksel??
meltem,
aksel is one of my twin nephews.
Best of luck… We’re still having trouble with our four year old, with no signs of change ahead. Our neighbor across the street still sleeps in her five year old’s room. It’s different for everyone.
You might also want to check out Weissbluth’s sleep book; we went through pretty much all of them and found Weissbluth to be the most helpful.
Our older one’s eyes changed from blue to brown between 9-14 months, then from brown to hazel at about 2 1/2 years, but they started out a much paler blue than David’s. My five month old’s left eye is just starting to turn brown right around the pupil.
oh i’ve read his books. i’ve read ALL the books 🙂 things are a bit better here. three nights in a row he’s gone down without nursing and only woke up twice for nursing, once around 11:30 and again around 4am. He sometimes stirrs a bit around 2:30 but goes down immediately. so it’s not as bad as it could be and he spends the whole night in his crib and gets around 11 hours of sleep at night so I am officially stopping freaking out. we’ll see where it goes.
as for the eye color, the fact that it lasted this long is a miracle to begin with, considering my middle-eastern and jewish roots 🙂