Lots of change

Lots of things are happening at once these days… a lot of different Asher issues have converged this week and we’re doing our best to keep up with it all.

First of all, Asher has started rolling non-stop from his back to his front. He won’t lay on his back for any length of time; he only wants to be on his belly. Like this…

(Yes, that is a Christmas tree on his butt… so cute!)

Of course, he can’t crawl, or even really scoot, so he gets frustrated with being on his belly for too long… so we turn him to his back, then he rolls over… repeat :). This new trick he’s learned has been causing us grief not because we have to continually turn him over when he starts yelling, but because he is still sleeping in the swaddle and he has now started turning over in his crib while swaddled! That’s a bad thing.

So this week we’ve been talking about taking the swaddle away. We’ve tried this before and it ended badly… he won’t sleep without the swaddle because he keeps hitting himself in the face or rubbing his eyes or jerking in his sleep… and then when he wakes up he can’t go back to sleep on his own so he wants to be held and bounced…. all.night.long. Hence the reason that after 4 or 5 failed attempts to remove the swaddle, we’ve returned every time.

I think there are really two issues at work and we needed to tackle both simultaneously: 1) he can’t GET to sleep without being held and bounced; and 2) he can’t STAY asleep without the swaddle. Ergo, if we got him to go to sleep without the swaddle by bouncing him, then whenever he would wake himself up in the night he would need us to bounce him again to get back to sleep. If we could teach him to go to sleep on his own, then he could come out of the swaddle because even if his arms woke him up in the night, he could put himself back to sleep.

Well, at the same time as all this, we’ve had to deal with another very pressing issue… namely, this…

… whole hand, in the mouth, all the time. Yes, he’s teething, but he’s also hungry… all the time. He weighs 17 pounds now and the milk is just not doing it for him anymore… this boy needs some food! Of course, this means that our “teaching him to sleep” plan is complicated by this new hunger issue. Normally he would sleep until 4am until he woke up hungry, but now he’ll wake at around midnight starving.

So what are we doing? Well, we’re trying to tackle them all at once, which means yesterday was a very big day for Asher.

1. He ate his first solid food :)… a little bit of baby cereal (okay, so it’s not really solid). He didn’t really like it, or perhaps I should say that he didn’t get the concept… he doesn’t understand food coming from a spoon yet.

2. We started a new sleep routine that does NOT include feeding him to sleep with a bottle. He didn’t like that so much… but it had to end some time.

3. It was the first night we put him down for bed WITHOUT bouncing him to sleep. I did, however, bounce him to try to get him to stop screaming for us to let him have that bottle in order to go to sleep.

4. It was the first night we put him to bed WITHOUT the swaddle.

Overall, it was a pretty successful night. He finally went to sleep and I think he’s learning how to get to sleep and stay asleep with no swaddle or bouncing… he’s discovered sleeping on his side, which he apparently likes very much.

Oh, and one more thing, change number 5 happened today… he is now sleeping in his own room! He has slept by our bed every night since he was born. That ends tonight… or, at least, we hope it does :).

By the way, whoever came up with the phrase “sleeping like a baby” should be shot.

The end result:

(A note for my photophile friends: 8 sec., f/3.5, ISO 800. It was nearly pitch black in the room, hence the 8 second exposure. Shooting wide open at f/1.4 would have helped, but it was hard to manual focus in the dark and f/3.5 is more forgiving.)