Mar
16
My SXSW recap, in brief: good panels, fun town, spectacularly terrible American Airlines customer service. Let me just say this: the trip was worth my while, but if I could do it over again I would definitely have tried harder not to lose my fucking wallet on Saturday. Coming home from Austin with no money and no I.D. was . . . not a good time.
The interminable hours of asshole-laden air travel were tempered almost immediately by the two feetie-pajama’d imps who greeted me at the door last night, though. Riley was hopping up and down and loudly wondering if I’d brought him anything (no, but that’s what swag bags are for, am I right? An Adobe-branded iPhone cozy becomes a tiny toy-sized sleeping bag just like that), Dylan was making his gorilla-like BABY IS HAPPY hooting sounds and scampering back and forth, pointing with great interest at my suitcase (ha, you and TSA both, kid) and begging to be picked up.
Sometimes it’s nice to go away just to come back, you know?
I was so wiped out last night I could barely stand the thought of having to deal with wee-hour sleep training issues, and you know what happened? With the exception of a single short bout of unenergetic fussing which required no intervention, Dylan slept straight through the night. JB reports that on Friday and Saturday he went in just once and patted Dylan’s back a little, after which he stayed quiet until morning, so — well, I hesitate to say this for fear things will immediately take a Turn for the Worse, but it appears things are going well in the sleep department.
I have a question, though, because it’s inevitable this will come up, and probably soon: what do you do when you have an illness/teething-related sleep regression? If he’s waking up because he’s uncomfortable or sick, should I go back to our old habits (bottle, rocking chair) to help soothe him? I’m guessing that doing so would basically set the entire process back at square one, but I have yet to experience a sick baby in the middle of the night under this new regime of No Bottle/Minimal Comforting.
Mar
11
We started Operation Sleep Through the Night last night, and it was . . . well, it wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t what I would call a relaxing hot stone massage with an epidural chaser, but it definitely could have been worse. My plan was to go in and comfort if needed, but eliminate the bottle feedings completely. His reaction to the missing bottle was quite dramatic (oh, the arched back! The furious screaming! The attempts to squirm from my arms and plummet headfirst onto the wooden floors!) it actually sort of made the entire process a little bit easier, because I can deal with anger much better than sorrow. JB and I took turns and went in three times, doing our best to pat and soothe and rock him back to sleep, but really there wasn’t much we could do. He clearly wanted the bottle, and since we weren’t going to give it to him we were at a sort of Tarantino-esque standoff — guns pointed all around, tension crackling in the air — and so we mostly just put him back down and tiptoed from the room while he kicked the mattress and howled baby cuss words at us.
He loudly protested the situation from about 12:30 to 3 AM, and then slept soundly until 8. I have no idea what we’re in for tonight, but I hope we’re on the right track. I also took the advice some of you gave about putting him down a little earlier. It didn’t seem to make a difference in terms of when he first woke up, but maybe once we get into a better routine it will help.
Oh, and for anyone else dealing with this sort of situation in a house where you cannot escape the noise no matter what you do, may I recommend the “3D Ocean Environment” from Darwin Chamber? You can find it on iTunes, it’s basically 90 minutes of ocean waves going into and out of your ears in this trippy full-sound kind of way and I found it to be very soothing. Every now and then I’d hit the pause button to make sure the crying hadn’t escalated, but the rest of the time I was mostly listening to water and seagulls and the occasional boooooooop of a . . . I don’t know, a Relaxing Oceanic Horn Of Some Kind. Boat? Lighthouse? Something.
Anyway, that’s what’s going on with that. I’ll keep you posted on how it all plays out. The good news for me is that I’m leaving town again for a couple nights this weekend (for SXSW, any of you going?) so ideally by the time I get home on Sunday Dylan will have got the whole thing figured out and all of us will start getting eight uninterrupted hours of sleep each night. Also, there will be a pony waiting for me. A magical pony who shits gold ingots and enjoys vacuuming.
God. Eight. Hours. In a row. I hadn’t truly realized how much I want my sleep back until I started actively taking steps to make this situation better.
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