These last seven weeks have been such a blur, I haven't had a chance to think about blogging, let alone come up with an interesting topic! Next week I will try to do a two-month update for sweet Isaac, so that you all know what he's up to. For now, though, I just want to jot a few things that might be worth remembering.
Joel and I have been discussing when to let Isaac cry it out. Sometimes during the day I simply don't have the opportunity to go help him out, so he cries to sleep out of sheer necessity. Amazing how a 15 month old can gobble up all your time! But this has definitely been more the exception than the rule, and frankly we are hoping he can become a little lower maintenance. I harbor no expectation that this will suddenly lead us to become well-rested people, since he is still waking a couple of times at night to eat (none of those amazing 5-6 hour stretches that Mikayla was doing at this age...yet...possibly because the poor kid has spent the last few weeks snotting around. The lack of oxygen probably wakes him if hunger doesn't.).
So I decided to peruse back over the blog to see when Mikayla first CIO. Turns out, she was almost exactly two months old. And Isaac will be two months old this Thursday. And this coincides with Dr. Marc Weissbluth's recommendation in Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Baby, a book that preserved our sanity the first time around with Mikayla. We are such intuitive parents, aren't we, knowing just when to start letting our children CIO? Or...two months is when we've reached our wits end on trying to get our child to sleep. Intuitive, or exhausted, take your pick.
Just now we decided to test the theory. Isaac went down in his playard at 6:25 and started to cry. But I KNEW he was tired, dry, and not hungry. Perfect recipe for a little CIO attempt, no? We set our mental timers to five minutes, because you can let your child cry for five minutes and still definitely be a good parent. At five minutes he was pretty unhappy with us, but we looked at each other and let the clock inch by to seven minutes...the wails were coming and going at this point. At ten minutes I decided to go rub his back, offer the Nuk, etc. Still pretty ticked, so I picked him up for a minute to soothe him. His eyes immediately started to drowse closed, so I dropped that kid like a (fragile) hot potato so that he could reap the full benefit of falling asleep on his own. Generous momma that I am.
Here we are at 6:55 and that little bug has been silent for at least ten minutes, meaning it took all of twenty for him to successfully CIO with a minor assist in the middle. It kind of feels like that moment when...no wait, actually there is nothing quite like the feeling of a SLEEPING INFANT.
Plus, Mikayla just went night-night, so we are enjoying one silent house at the moment. Joel and I are whispering to each other just to make sure we don't break it. Notable quotable from Joel: "Our house hasn't been this quiet in seven weeks."
We are strongly considering letting Isaac CIO at bedtime tonight, but it would mean probably sleeping him in his playard downstairs, so he doesn't wake his sister. But perhaps, if it takes less than twenty minutes, we could tolerate having him in our room.
On that note, gotta run. Our neighbor's dog just started barking, loudly, and Mikayla's monitor just flipped on, meaning she's awake. Keep an eye on the news tonight; if you hear my name, you'll know this didn't end well. No, seriously.
SDG!
No comments:
Post a Comment