Another rainy day. Everyone here is very sleepy. Eric snoozed through from 10 to 7 again, though it's not always an immediate gain for me. Here's an interesting thing he does: when he gives up a nighttime feeding, for several nights afterwards he gets restless in his sleep at about that time. He's not, apparently, hungry enough to wake up all the way, but he is hungry enough to get restless. His body is the arena for an epic battle between Hunger and Sleep. I can tip things in favor of Sleep if I can keep a pacifier in his mouth. So I spend half an hour or so on pacifier maintenance, popping it back into his mouth each time he gets restless. After about half an hour or so, he goes back into deep sleep and stays there until the next feeding time. Eventually, he will start sleeping straight through--this is what happened with the 1 a.m. feeding, and the 3 a.m. feeding (which is now commemorated only by a brief stretch-and-wiggle which neither of us has to wake up completely for), and is what I guess will happen with the 5 a.m. feeding, during which I am now doing Sleep Encouragement. It can be frustrating, because, as happened this morning, I can't get out of bed to go to the bathroom because that wakes him up all the way and then he needs to eat. I have to wait until he is deeply asleep again to creep off and pee, and that can make for an uncomfortable half hour. But eventually, I trust, he will go straight through.
I think this might be one of the advantages of co-sleeping. If he were in a crib, his restlessness would wake him up, I wouldn't hear him until he was crying, and he'd need to eat. I think we'd have had trouble giving up some of these nighttime feedings if he weren't sleeping with me--and if there weren't a pacifier handy.
Of course, skipping nighttime feedings pushes the daytime feedings closer together. We're back to about every three hours during the day, because otherwise he can't get enough food.
His first stint with a real babysitter went well. He stayed with our friend Sarah while I went to faculty orientation (a waste of time, mostly...though I did get a free coffee mug, and I will be paid a pittance for my time). He was charming, though Sarah said, "He is the wiggliest baby I've ever met. How do you ever feed him?" And she is right. He has developed a new habit of wiggling and wiggling all through feedings. And sometimes he gets interested in something else and forgets he's eating for five minutes or so, and you think he's done, until five minutes later when he lets out an angry shriek as if to say, "Why did you take my bottle away, you big meanie?" We've had feedings take up to an hour lately if they happen to fall during a particularly active time of day.
He's efficient with nighttime feedings, thank goodness, and with the first bottle of the morning--too hungry to waste time when it's been nine hours since his last meal.
Posted by Su Penn at August 22, 2003 01:59 PM | TrackBack