Since the new owner of BME has removed most of Shannon Larratt’s life work from the site, including the well known article, Love at First Bite, featuring Clive and I way back in 2005, I was given an HTML copy of it and have “republished” it on my own domain. You can read it, or re-read it, here.
(The finger in the bottom right photo is actually that of my friend Twwly who experienced an “unfortunate” event with a chisel.)
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Ever since we came back from Cuba Ash has relapsed on bad sleeping habits. He went from sleeping steadily between 7-11 without waking up, and waking every two hours throughout the night (which I didn’t mind, because I was able to nurse him back to sleep while basically staying asleep myself). Now he wakes up every 20-40 minutes from 7-11 (which makes working really, really difficult) and whining many times in the middle of the night as soon as he is even slightly awake, which makes me not want to nurse him at all, even though I know it’d put him back to sleep very quickly. I just can’t stand the whining. Ughhhh.
So, to combat the evening wakeups, I’ve stopped nursing him back to sleep to try to sway him away from waking up to get something he loves so much- milk. I immediately go to him and offer him water and tell him that milk is all done, and sometimes he cries as if his first girlfriend has dumped him- full out wails- and sometimes he just whines and roots around for the boob. I cuddle him and sing him Frere Jacques and he goes back to sleep almost as quickly as he would have had he been given milk. His cries never last more than a minute and he’s back to sleep within three or four minutes. He knows I’m there for him, and is comforted immediately as soon as I walk in the room, but I’m just refusing to nurse. The waking up periods have gotten fewer and fewer in the past couple of nights and so I think it’s working. I don’t mind nursing in the middle of the night, just as long as there’s no whining.
I think he’s starting to be ready for one nap a day, but I’m not sure if I am yet. It’s a terrifying idea, not having my two blessed “breaks” (during which I sew, so they’re not really breaks), but at the same time I would be able to go to playdates (Penelope!) and other activities more often because there is NOTHING ever organized for the noon hour in which he’s usually awake for. Literally, the playgrounds are deserted. What would I do with all of these winter hours with him? I’m looking forward to him being able to concentrate on one task long enough and have the motor control to do things like colour a picture and stuff. Right now it’s all about chasing each other around the house as monsters, reading, and playing with cars.
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I packed my first box today. I’m SO READY to move out of this teensy little apartment.
was having them sleep on Daddys side of the bed (kid on outside, with the toddler rail thingy on it. I think they could smell the milk and want it but Daddy’s powerful Daddysmell threw them off. At any rate it worked.
