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four months
I am more than two weeks late to reflect that the prince is four months old.
He likes or does not mind me, his father, snuggling, milk, bath time, standing up on our legs and looking around, gurgling and cooing and practicing his vowel sounds, grabbing his feet, and rolling from one side to the other (almost exactly in "happy baby" pose). He dislikes wet diapers, dirty diapers, being cold, being tired, being hungry, and being lonely when he wakes up in the middle of the night.
We moved him from the co-sleeper crib into his crib in his own room a couple of weeks ago. That hasn't been too bad. When I'm asleep I don't always hear him on the monitor and Himself sometimes has to wake me, but all three of us can live with that. And bedtime is easy-peasy anymore. (It's dead easy when I nurse him at bedtime, which I guess is setting myself up for a lot of difficulty later in his life, but it's also easy when he gets a bottle at bedtime when I'm not here, so.) He used to go down soorrrrt of easily and then fuss two or three times over the next half-hour (or more) until he was asleep for the night; now he goes down easy as pie and might fuss once five or ten minutes later if he drops his pacifier before he's deeply enough asleep not to mind.
What's tough is overnight wakeups. If he's in bed and asleep by 8pm, and we want him to wake up at 6am, he needs to eat around 1am (per his doctor; she doesn't want him going more than six hours without feeding at this point, for reasons, and that's okay with me because he's lower on the growth chart than I'd like - which is a whole other set of my own neuroses, but whatever, the point is if he happens to sleep through the night and I don't wake up to feed him it's not the end of the world, but we don't yet want to make a habit of that, and we're not to encourage him to sleep through yet either). We know from weeks and months of experience that he is capable of sleeping from before 8pm to 1 or 2am. But lately he goes down around 7:30 or 8pm and wakes up at like 11 or 11:30, which is - not that I couldn't feed him at that time, but then he will also wake up at 2am and again at sort of 4 or 4:30, and I can't feed him every time he wakes up over night or two things will happen: (1) he will not know the difference between night and day and (2) I will die. One night last week or maybe the week before I did get up each time he woke up and the third time he cried I like physically could not move. It was as if every cell in my body said "What are you doing. You have got to sleep."
We tried Ferber training the week after we moved him into his own room. It seems to have worked a treat (by the second night!) on bedtime, which is how we got that to where it is, but it hasn't worked at all w/r/t night wakings. The goal of course is for him to be able to settle himself back to sleep if he wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn't need us - that is, if he wakes up and isn't hungry we won't even know about it because he'll fall asleep again within a couple of minutes. Unfortunately for the wakeups where I wasn't nursing him, he wasn't falling asleep any quicker from one night to the next with the Ferber thing - he was just screaming for NLT 15 minutes and when we're in the next room it doesn't matter how low we turn the volume on the monitor when we set the timer; we can hear him loud and clear. So nobody's sleep was improving, neither his nor ours, and after two weeks of that we concluded he isn't ready right now and pulled the plug. I assume we'll give it another shot in another couple-few weeks.
He's also not ready for solid foods. We put him in his high chair as an experiment, and he likes it up there because he can look around and see more things, but yesterday we gave him a dab of rice cereal and he was like aggressively not interested.
He's rolled over a few times, but is not doing this reliably yet. Several weeks ago he rolled over once in the pack-n-play, and once since then he rolled over toward his dad on the big bed, but in both of those cases I think he had a gravity assist. But last Saturday he rolled over from his tummy onto his back! He was super surprised and wouldn't try it again. Then this past Thursday he did it again and smiled when I cheered for him (instead of looking alarmed); he did it a second time when I scientifically put him back on his tummy, and that's when I realized I should have got the camera for effort #2 because he was a lot less enthusiastic about doing it a third time. But he did, so now his grandmas and everybody have seen it.
In the past day or so he is also doing better at tripoding - propping himself on his hands to stay sitting up. So real sitting hopefully won't be too far behind. He's growing so fast!
He likes or does not mind me, his father, snuggling, milk, bath time, standing up on our legs and looking around, gurgling and cooing and practicing his vowel sounds, grabbing his feet, and rolling from one side to the other (almost exactly in "happy baby" pose). He dislikes wet diapers, dirty diapers, being cold, being tired, being hungry, and being lonely when he wakes up in the middle of the night.
We moved him from the co-sleeper crib into his crib in his own room a couple of weeks ago. That hasn't been too bad. When I'm asleep I don't always hear him on the monitor and Himself sometimes has to wake me, but all three of us can live with that. And bedtime is easy-peasy anymore. (It's dead easy when I nurse him at bedtime, which I guess is setting myself up for a lot of difficulty later in his life, but it's also easy when he gets a bottle at bedtime when I'm not here, so.) He used to go down soorrrrt of easily and then fuss two or three times over the next half-hour (or more) until he was asleep for the night; now he goes down easy as pie and might fuss once five or ten minutes later if he drops his pacifier before he's deeply enough asleep not to mind.
What's tough is overnight wakeups. If he's in bed and asleep by 8pm, and we want him to wake up at 6am, he needs to eat around 1am (per his doctor; she doesn't want him going more than six hours without feeding at this point, for reasons, and that's okay with me because he's lower on the growth chart than I'd like - which is a whole other set of my own neuroses, but whatever, the point is if he happens to sleep through the night and I don't wake up to feed him it's not the end of the world, but we don't yet want to make a habit of that, and we're not to encourage him to sleep through yet either). We know from weeks and months of experience that he is capable of sleeping from before 8pm to 1 or 2am. But lately he goes down around 7:30 or 8pm and wakes up at like 11 or 11:30, which is - not that I couldn't feed him at that time, but then he will also wake up at 2am and again at sort of 4 or 4:30, and I can't feed him every time he wakes up over night or two things will happen: (1) he will not know the difference between night and day and (2) I will die. One night last week or maybe the week before I did get up each time he woke up and the third time he cried I like physically could not move. It was as if every cell in my body said "What are you doing. You have got to sleep."
We tried Ferber training the week after we moved him into his own room. It seems to have worked a treat (by the second night!) on bedtime, which is how we got that to where it is, but it hasn't worked at all w/r/t night wakings. The goal of course is for him to be able to settle himself back to sleep if he wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn't need us - that is, if he wakes up and isn't hungry we won't even know about it because he'll fall asleep again within a couple of minutes. Unfortunately for the wakeups where I wasn't nursing him, he wasn't falling asleep any quicker from one night to the next with the Ferber thing - he was just screaming for NLT 15 minutes and when we're in the next room it doesn't matter how low we turn the volume on the monitor when we set the timer; we can hear him loud and clear. So nobody's sleep was improving, neither his nor ours, and after two weeks of that we concluded he isn't ready right now and pulled the plug. I assume we'll give it another shot in another couple-few weeks.
He's also not ready for solid foods. We put him in his high chair as an experiment, and he likes it up there because he can look around and see more things, but yesterday we gave him a dab of rice cereal and he was like aggressively not interested.
He's rolled over a few times, but is not doing this reliably yet. Several weeks ago he rolled over once in the pack-n-play, and once since then he rolled over toward his dad on the big bed, but in both of those cases I think he had a gravity assist. But last Saturday he rolled over from his tummy onto his back! He was super surprised and wouldn't try it again. Then this past Thursday he did it again and smiled when I cheered for him (instead of looking alarmed); he did it a second time when I scientifically put him back on his tummy, and that's when I realized I should have got the camera for effort #2 because he was a lot less enthusiastic about doing it a third time. But he did, so now his grandmas and everybody have seen it.
In the past day or so he is also doing better at tripoding - propping himself on his hands to stay sitting up. So real sitting hopefully won't be too far behind. He's growing so fast!
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