Friday at the tail end of a long naptime

Wow, I'm having a hard time getting anything done. I mean, anything but menial chores. Part of it probably has to do with being pregnant, but mostly I think it has to do with having a very active toddler. When I'm not interacting with him or out with him somewhere, I spend most of my time cleaning and picking up the house, washing clothes and dishes. Order is important to me, and yet I often feel like I have nothing to show for my efforts. I get to enjoy a tidy room or a clean kitchen for a fraction of a second before it's all undone and the cycle starts again. Over and over. I feel like a hamster in a wheel, running and running but not getting anywhere. I'm sure this is the lament of many a mom. You'll have to cut me some slack, because TJ was out of town all week and I'm pretty burned out.

I took E for his 18-month well check yesterday (a month late). He got the dreaded MMR shot, which I've been fearing and avoiding for a year. I would've waited until his two-year checkup, but that's right around when the baby is due, so I decided to go ahead and do it now. And you know what? It was no big deal. I mean, he cried (he got two shots), but he was fine shortly afterward, and he was his usual energetic, happy self the rest of the day. We went to play at the Central Market playscape afterward and he had a freaking blast. He has taken monster naps yesterday and today, and this morning he was very difficult to deal with, but that seems to be more from his bottom canines. So, whew, glad the MMR is over.

By the way, he weighed in at 27 pounds, 11 ounces (75th percentile) and he's 32.5 inches tall (60th percentile). His head circumference is in the 90th percentile.

One thing that jumped out at me from the info sheet they gave us about this age: Don't expect them to share yet. Case in point: E's friend Jonas came over yesterday afternoon and there were many tears shed over the miniature Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner we have. Learning to share is hard.

Last Saturday I drove up to Ft. Worth to help throw a bachelorette party for a high school friend. Several of the girls were staying out all night with the bride, but I rode up and back with a friend of mine who's also pregnant (just two weeks apart!) and mama to a toddler. Partying all night and being away from our families the whole weekend wasn't something we felt comfortable with, so we drove up that morning and then back after a late dinner. I got home at 3 a.m. Groan. TJ left that day (though not until the afternoon).

I have to say that the best part of the day on Saturday was talking to my friend in the car. We talked for a total of around seven hours at least. Non-stop. And I felt like we could've talked longer. It was such a treat. No interruptions, no one else to take care of, and endless subjects to talk about. I love this friend, and I wish we got to see each other more often.

Well, E's up now. More soon, hopefully.

Ikea and the In-Laws

I'm in a tizzy getting ready for the arrival of TJ's parents tomorrow. They're staying with us for five nights. Eeeeek. They've never both stayed with us before, and we're not really equipped to accommodate their lifestyle. (They sleep in separate rooms and they often watch tv during the night. They're also not super mobile, and our kitchen and bedrooms are on separate floors.)

In any case, this will be short and scattered, probably. Let's see . . . Eamon is really fighting the morning nap. We'll see how long this trend continues. He's also taken to sticking his tongue out a little to feel his bottom teeth. It's pretty darn cute.

Yesterday Catherine came with us to Ikea. Thank god she wanted to come; I don't know how I would've managed the stroller and the huge frames we bought. I obviously hadn't thought it through. I was so absent-minded yesterday I neglected to pack E's lunch, so we had to stop at Wal-Mart (it was the closest thing) and pick up some baby food and spoons. She fed him in the car while I drove. We had a limited amount of time before he was going to be ready to nap, and Ikea is not a store you can rush through (to put it mildly). We rushed as much as human beings can while happily trapped in the alternate reality that is Ikea. Oh Ikea, why must you tempt me to buy a bunch of crap I don't need? I must admit that I'm thrilled with the cheap framed art we got there, though, and I didn't buy any frivolous items. Our walls are so bare, and it's too expensive to get things framed, but I've been wanting to hang stuff, and I figured I'd use his parents' visit as the impetus to do so. (Plus, last time his mom said something about how it still looked like we'd just moved in. She said it as a compliment, sort of, but it didn't feel like one.) Catherine suggested some bright throw pillows to go along with the prints I bought. Thanks to all that, the loft is looking much less beige. And I also ended up framing one of TJ's old paintings. I ripped the canvas off the wooden frame it was stapled to and taped it to the Ikea matte. It looks fantastic! I hope to frame more of his stuff, and perhaps one day we can get his paintings professionally framed.

I bought a new twin sheet and comforter set as well (not at Ikea) and some curtains to go in my office/the guest room, which will hopefully make the room cooler in the afternoon when the sun beats down on the window. The blinds just aren't cutting it. We now have enough bedding for the twin guest bed as well as the trundle underneath.

Well, I'm rambling about boring stuff, so I better try to get some things done while E naps. I don't know how often I'll be able to post in the next week . . . but maybe more than I think.

Friday and Saturday

We had a busy weekend. Friday night Catherine and Shannon came with me to Wimberley to see my mom perform her one-woman concert (a benefit for a children's grief camp she works at each summer). She's doing two in Dallas, where she lives, one in Wimberley, and maybe one in San Marcos. I wasn't sure what to expect and was nervous going into it, but she was incredible, I have to say. It's been quite awhile since I heard her sing, and she's been training for this concert for a year and a half. Her voice is in the best shape it's ever been in. Really, there aren't words to describe it. The program was very diverse, ranging from Faure and Handel to Gershwin and Sondheim. She also sang a few children's songs she wrote many years ago when my sisters were little. The last song she did was "Autumn Leaves," by Joseph Kosma. I'd never heard it before, and apparently it's my grandmother's favorite song. It was so sad and so beautiful--I cried and cried, thinking of Papa.

In any case, Catherine and Shannon and I had so much fun on our little road trip. It felt like we were back in college. TJ and Eamon, in the meantime, enjoyed their time alone together. E had some trouble falling asleep (he's been nursing to sleep almost every night lately), but it wasn't horrible, and he was out by 6:30.

His second tooth emerged the following morning (I swear it came through between the time he woke up and the time he went down for his first nap). He proceeded to take two good naps that day, so I think we're out of the woods with this one, and all in all it wasn't too bad. I thought his nighttime sleep would be a mess, but it really wasn't (and last night he went eleven hours straight). He seems to have lost the ability to fall asleep on his own, however. I've been having to nurse him down for naps. Hmmm.

My mom came over on Saturday and we took her to lunch at the Eastside Cafe, which of course she loved. She hadn't seen E in a long time. Here's a picture of them having fun together on the couch.

Progress, and No Naps Continue

E slept a TOTAL of thirty minutes yesterday (we never made it to the Y; I didn't think he could handle it). By the time I fed him dinner I was about to gouge my eyeballs out. Okay, not really. But it was very, very draining, and he was hard to keep happy.

I can't actually post right now because I've been trying to get him down for a nap for an hour, and I'm about to give up. (It's 9:20 a.m. and he's been awake since 4:30.) This is miserable! Oddly enough, though, he didn't wake up a ton last night. This tooth is manifesting itself very differently than the first one. The good news is that we're definitely seeing progress. The tooth hasn't broken through the gum yet, but it looks like it has. I figure it'll happen tonight.

I hope TJ doesn't have a rough time later this afternoon and evening while I'm gone. Eeeek.

Well, I'm going to go rescue him and take him to storytime and then Central Market.

Challenging Days, Joining the Y

Maybe #2 isn't as close as I thought. I don't know. It's hard to predict. But yesterday he was crankier than he's almost ever been (not counting his first three to four months). The only other day that comes close was the day after his first tooth broke through the gum. So I can only figure that teething is the culprit. We thought he'd be up a lot last night, but he wasn't, though I did give him Tylenol at 5 a.m. Today he's on nap strike. Day 2. I couldn't get him down yesterday morning, and when he did nap it wasn't for long. Today looks like it's going to be a repeat. After such a great stretch of napping and a fairly predictable schedule, it's amazing to see how quickly things can deteriorate. Ugh.

Today I think we'll go to Linens-n-Things to look for curtains and a set of sheets in preparation for TJ's parents' visit (they arrive next Thursday), and maybe we'll go to the Y, which we joined on Memorial Day. I'd already signed E and I up for parent/child swim lessons there starting later in June, and we decided to go check it out on the holiday. TJ has gained a little weight since he quit smoking a year ago, and he's not the type to work out in a regular gym. He's more into stuff like swimming and basketball (not that he's done either in a looooong time). We were really impressed with this Y. The facility is to die for; it's only been open a few years. And they offer free child care. And the join fee was minimal (some deal they were offering), and it's month to month. We felt like we couldn't pass it up. I just hope we stick with it. TJ went yesterday and had a good experience. It seemed to work really well for him to go around 4:00.

Well, I don't think this nap is going to take. Aaaaaaggghhh. I've been going in there periodically for the past hour (feels like longer). I think it's time to throw in the towel.

Storytime, Siblings

We made it to our first storytime at Family Connections this morning. (Family Connections is a nonprofit resource center for families with young children. It's super cool from what I can tell. My friend Morgan works at the library there.) We hadn't made it until today because storytime takes place at 10 a.m. and Eamon's morning nap usually conflicts. But today he was up at 5:30 (ugh), which meant he went down for his nap at 8:00 and was up in time for us to nurse and go. There were lots of kids (from tiny infants to kindergarten age) and parents. I'd say the average age was two to three. The group was pretty diverse (for Austin), which was cool. After living in DC for six years (TJ for ten), Austin seemed freakishly white to us at first. The actual stories and even the songs were lost on Eamon for the most part, but the people-watching was great (for both of us), and he seemed to enjoy himself.

Many of the moms there had two or three kids. Several were nursing a baby while tending to an older child/children as well. I could not take my eyes off these moms. They are in a totally different place than I am, and I'm very aware of that. I wish I could be a fly on their walls and see what their days are like. One mom in particular caught my eye. She had two boys who looked to be around five and three, and a gorgeous baby girl who appeared to be around six months and was wearing a onesie that had clearly been handed down by her brothers. The mom was sporty looking, tan and in shape (this seems important somehow), and seemingly happy and relaxed. She was sitting with one arm around each boy, holding them close, while the baby played on the floor in front of them. I guess I tend to think of moms with more than one young child as being stressed out, exhausted, impatient, and having to discipline constantly. It freaks me out. So it was nice to see some positive images that contradict the ones in my head.

I left feeling very conscious of all the focus that is on Eamon. He's our one and only right now, and he has our undivided attention. We're so in love with him, we've turned into babbling idiots. I notice and think about and scrutinize everything he does and everything I do for him. Our life revolves around him completely. I'm compulsive about updating this blog, downloading and sorting all the pictures we take of him, ordering prints and putting them into albums and labeling them, filling in his baby journals, etc. I realize that contrary to how it feels at times, I actually have a lot of time and space and freedom. Our life is very quiet and organized. I know it won't always be this way, so I'm glad to have this time, but I also look forward to Eamon having a brother or sister. I'm just grateful for the gradual way life with our first baby has unfolded. You're thrown in the deep end at first (to put it mildly), no matter how experienced you are with other people's babies, but then you slowly get your bearings. You slowly get a little more sleep, start to feel more human, more like yourself. They change, and you change with them, and soon you're a master at doing things you had no idea how to do a few months earlier. You reach a new normal at some point, a normal that would've been incredibly hard in your previous life but is just . . . life now, a life you wouldn't trade for anything. I suppose the same thing happens when you have additional babies--you reach a new normal. I've heard it can take a full year after your second. I'm content right now to watch others figure out that juggling act. I've got my beautiful little man, and to be honest, almost eight months into it, it's still sinking in that he's really here.

More of a Schedule

It looks like we're seeing a major shift in the way Eamon naps. It's happened gradually over the past few weeks. He's consistently taking two naps every day around the same times (9:00ish and 1:00ish), and they're tending to last an hour to an hour and a half. I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SEE THE DAY. And yet I've already come to expect the longer naps. It's interesting how quickly you can get used to something.

The window of time we can be away from home has shortened as a result of this new schedule. In the past I didn't try to be home in the afternoon by a certain time. The times of his naps varied, and they were never longer than half an hour anyway. I found that I often needed to be out in the afternoon in order to stay sane. But it's now become a priority to get home. Sometimes he'll fall asleep in the car and then I'll transfer him to his crib (he often wakes up, but has more often than not been content to play awhile before falling asleep again, or he fusses some, but doesn't full-on cry).

Yesterday we were in South Austin at a friend's house for lunch and he became unhappy very suddenly after we'd finished eating. I asked my friend if it was close to 1:00 and she looked at her watch and said it was 12:55. She was impressed that I'd called it, and I have to admit that I was too. Man, life is so much easier with a little predictability. (Of course, yesterday was a day he fell asleep in the car on the way home and then wouldn't go down again after we got here. I tried again at 2:45 and he crashed until I had to wake him up at 4:15 for our weekly playdate with Kay and Jonas--and also because I didn't want him napping too late in the day.)

Why do none of the sleep books talk about babies who don't nap well or have any consistent schedule for the first six months, but who then start to nap longer around seven months? I've heard other people talk about this happening but have never read anything that mentions it. I wasted a lot of time worrying that Eamon wasn't getting enough sleep and trying to find ways to solve the problem. Now I think he was just being himself and sleeping as long as he could at that stage of his life. I'm so glad we never tried to force him to sleep longer by letting him cry.

In any case, hopefully this nap trend is here to stay. It feels like it is. I can't imagine people who've had days like this since their babes were two or three months old. It's a different world, I tell you. Still tiring, but with longer breaks and more time to get stuff done.

Early morning, good nap, reaching

Well, last night wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Once the Tylenol set in, E slept until 1 a.m. and then till 5:30. Unfortunately, he was up for the day then. I got TJ up at 6:00 after nursing and went back to bed until 7:30. I usually can't fall back asleep, but I did doze on and off. For the millionth time, I have to thank my lucky stars that TJ has a new job and is present in our house again. I look back now and wonder how we did it.

This afternoon, I heard E wake up from his nap, so I hurriedly finished the dishes I was doing downstairs and ran up to get him. He'd been crying off and on for maybe a minute, but by the time I reached his door, all was quiet. And stayed that way. He stopped so suddenly I was imagining some freakish way that he could've suffocated or hung himself on his crib or something. I opened the door quietly and found him asleep on his tummy with one of his legs stuck awkwardly through the side of the crib, all the way up to his thigh. Poor guy. I didn't disturb him because he was sleeping peacefully and clearly okay, but I'll be glad when the breathable crib bumper I ordered arrives.

One last thing. Eamon reached out for me today for the first time. We'd gone to meet my stepmom and my stepbrother and his new wife, and Grandma had taken E. I was standing next to her, and he reached both his arms out and lunged towards me. I've seen babies do this a million times, but never my own. Aw, shucks. It was pretty cool.

Night to End All Nights

Last night was a doozy. I lost count of how many times Eamon got up. Eight? Ten? I was exhausted going into it (he hasn't had any good nights lately), so I felt like total crap by this morning and have had a headache all day. He was up at 6:15 for the day (so much for my fantasy of him sleeping later after waking up so many times), and has barely napped at all today. At the moment he's in his crib, crying, and I'm going in periodically to comfort him. He's upset and crying no matter where he is--in bed, in my arms, or playing. He clearly needs to sleep, and the crying is inevitable at this point. Ugh.

We met Catherine today to walk around Town Lake. When I woke up this morning I didn't think I had it in me to go, but we made it, and had a wonderful (!) time. Afterwards we all met Shannon for lunch. It was good that we had somewhere to go today. On days like this, it's best to be out.

I'm not sure what to do about these numerous, endless night wakings. I feel like I can tell when he's in pain from teething, and that wasn't what was going on last night. We think part of what's happening is that he's rolling over in his sleep and then waking up. I think we're going to try not going in at his first cry tonight, and see what happens. I can't imagine him going back to sleep without getting hysterical, but I guess we'll see. I feel like we're in a terrible pattern that needs to be turned on its head.

Well, I just spent forever in there rocking him. Right as I was about to give up, lo and behold, he put his head down and kept it down. I continued rocking him until I was pretty sure he was asleep, or well on his way, then put him down . . . and he started crying immediately. (I'm not far behind at this point.) I finally gave up (this has been going on for 45 minutes) and now he's playing here beside me. I feel dangerously burned out. I know it's mostly due to sleep deprivation, and the consequence of feeling like I haven't had a break. Surely tonight will be better. Right?

Better Already?

Maybe things aren't quite as dire with the teething as I thought in terms of what's in store for us. E still woke up several times last night, so it's not like it was a breeze, but it wasn't anything like the night before. I got a four-hour stretch of sleep followed by a 2.5-hour stretch. It felt amazing after the night before. I gather the pain is worse right before the tooth breaks through the gum, so maybe that was as bad as it gets? That would be nice. I guess we'll find out. I can deal with a couple of nights without sleep, but weeks on end? That's what I dread. I actually dread it more having lived through it for so long last fall.

We gave him two doses of Tylenol last night. During the day I'm using homeopathic teething tablets.

Right now he's taking a nap on his tummy (after many tears, sadly). He's been asleep for almost an hour. Ah, boy, it's a treat.

Oh! I think I hear him. One of the things I love about him taking a good nap is that I can't wait to pick him up and snuggle him afterwards. Not that I ever don't love that, but it's especially nice after he's been asleep awhile. Part of me gets to missing him. (The other part would love a four-hour nap!)

Tired and Stuck

Last night was rough, partly because I ended up at CVS at 1 a.m. buying a nine-volt battery for one of our smoke alarms that started chirping loudly sometime after midnight (and wouldn't stop without a new battery), and partly because E woke up a lot. His bottom gum looks a little swollen around where the two teeth are buried. He's also touchy and cries easily. We feel bad for him. He sure will look cute with those little teeth, though.

This morning he rolled over in his crib for the first time during the hour-and-a-half-long saga of getting him down for a nap. He was exhausted from the beginning and I ended up nursing him down. He wound up on his tummy twice before that, and he freaked out. He can only roll to his left for some reason (it's pretty funny), so he was stuck and didn't know what to do. So many changes for a little guy . . .

p.s. It's a beautiful day here in Central Texas.

Nap Battle

Aaaaaagh! E is exhausted but has fought naps with all his might today.

I'm still holding on to the slim hope that at some point he'll start taking one long afternoon nap a day. But in reality there's absolutely no sign of that happening.

Sleep Stuff

Eamon had such a hard time going down tonight. We rocked him multiple times. I was so sad for him. It started when we were sitting out front. I had just put him down and he was out like a light. We weren't going to be outside long (fifteen minutes, twenty at most). We didn't think there was any chance he would wake up, and we didn't take a monitor out with us. I thought about checking on him several times while we were outside and should've trusted my instincts. When we went inside, sure enough, he was crying. Oh, did I run up those stairs. We won't be making that mistake again.

This week, E has only taken two thirty minute naps (less today) within a twelve hour period, and then he's crashed at 6:00 p.m. In anticipation of this I've been feeding him dinner at 5:00 instead of 6:00 and doing his bath at 5:30. He's slept through the night for the most part, waking up at 6:00 a.m. instead of 7:00.

I'm always trying to note routines and patterns, but in reality things are always changing. New patterns emerge for a time, only to be replaced and then replaced again. I know, I know: that's parenthood. But it does seem like a major shift happened around the time we got home from our trips. He's never slept through the night as often as he has since then. That'll all fly out the window once teething really hits, though, or so I hear.

There are so many other things I want to write about here, but I'm too tired, as usual. A reporting on sleep patterns is the best I can do.

Long Day

Eamon has had a tough day, and I've gotten nothing done. It's 4:00 now, and since 7:00 this morning he's napped a total of about thirty minutes. Ugh. It's frustrating. He hasn't been very happy either. I don't get the sense that he's teething or anything, just that he's tired. I've rocked him to sleep numerous times, but he wakes up and screams when I put him down. We escaped to Target awhile ago, and it was good to get out, but now we're home and he's up. Our friends Kay and Jonas (Jonas is six weeks older than E) were supposed to come over for our weekly playdate, but Kay's taking Jonas to the doctor this afternoon to see about his congestion and wheezing (poor Jonas), so they can't make it. Kay was going to give TJ and me a cloth diaper tutorial, by the way, because apparently we're not very gifted in that department. We can't get the damn things on him! It's harder than it looks.

Anyway, I think we'll go on a long walk now. Not sure what else to do.

p.s. You know, a few months ago most days were as long and hard and frustrating as this one. Actually, make that longer and harder. In fact, I shouldn't even try to compare: Things are way easier now. Even when they're not.

Holy Nap!

It's 2:30 now. I put E down (wide awake) at 12:10. It took him about fifteen minutes to fall asleep. And he's STILL ASLEEP. I don't think I can express to you what a big deal this is. This is a baby who almost always naps for half an hour, and *sometimes* for as long as forty-five minutes or even an hour. But TWO hours? Never, never, never.

It's amazing how long two hours feels when you're used to racing around in a thirty-minute window.
I could get used to this!

I knew this would happen, but it still shocked me.

Eamon had his first big-person poop today. Egads! It smelled like real poop, and it looked kinda like real poop too, even though it was soft by grownup standards. He seemed to have trouble getting it out, and then he cried and cried when I was changing him, as though he were hurting. I was afraid he was constipated, but when I read up on it I gathered that he probably wasn't as long as his stool was soft. Maybe it just didn't feel good to him. :(

We haven't introduced prunes yet, and he's not big on water at this point, so I'm not really sure what to do to make it easier on him. Maybe his system is just getting used to this new form of food. I do plan on giving him prunes soon.

Today at lunchtime he had his first two-course meal: bananas and cereal mixed with breastmilk and then sweet potatoes mixed with breastmilk, or EBM as I gather the veterans like to call it. I don't know if I needed to add much milk to the sweet potatoes, but I have a bunch in the fridge right now, so I figured I might as well. It seemed like he ate a lot, which is why I busted out the second course. Does this mean I should be feeding him solid food twice a day? I was planning on adding a second meal around seven months, but I could do it sooner. He'll be six months officially on Sunday.

Incidentally, E is asleep right now and has been for an hour. This is the first time since Tuesday that he's napped for longer than his customary thirty minutes. I put him down wide awake, too. He hardly cried at all. I don't think I can express to you how NUTS this is. Nuts and wonderful. Meanwhile, he's still batting a thousand at night. Eleven hours last night. This is the opposite extreme of where we were two weeks ago. Babies are a mystery.

I love my mystery.

Schedule, Shmedule

Up until now, we haven't really had a schedule. I try to space feedings three hours apart, but that's just an average, and the feeding times vary. Eamon also hasn't really had a bedtime, although for awhile it seemed to happen most often around 8:00 no matter what we did. Now we seem to be falling into a pattern, and I'm digging it. I'd like to help facilitate it.

Mornings are the most consistent. They look something like:

7:00 wake up, play in crib while Mom and Dad doze and listen to the sweet sounds of a happy baby coming through the monitor
7:30 nurse
8:00-8:30 cuddle in Mom and Dad's bed, then play on their bed while Mom gets dressed and does her thang
8:30-9:00 downstairs with Mom (I eat breakfast, feed the cat, etc.)
9:00 back upstairs for first nap
10:30 (or so) nurse
11:30 nap
12:30 (or so) solid food

From there it varies. Since he usually takes such short naps, there's often a nap every two or so hours. So either three or four a day. Yesterday worked out very well, with naps at 9:15, 11:30, 3:00, and then I nursed him to sleep for the night at 6:30. (He didn't stay down though. TJ ended up rocking him for quite awhile, so it was probably 7:30 by the time he really went down. But then he slept straight through until 7:00 this morning!) The night before he ended up needing a nap at 5:00, which sort of screwed up bedtime.

Ever since our last night in New Orleans he's been sleeping through the night like a champ. And I'm not talking six hours, I'm talking eight, eleven, and twelve hours at a time. I'm enjoying it while it lasts, because I know it won't last forever. The two to three weeks leading up to our trips were hellish. He was waking up every two to three hours, and our first two nights in Florida it was every hour. He has no signs of teeth yet, but we feel like his gums hurt at night, and he also seemed to be having gas troubles a few weeks ago, when we first started solids.

I don't know, I go back and forth between wanting to have a strict schedule and wanting to just sit back and let whatever happens happen. It would be easier if I strongly believed in doing it one way or another, but in truth I think I fall somewhere in the middle. Maybe I should just own that, and then I wouldn't feel as insecure as I do sometimes, especially when talking to moms who are either super schedule oriented or not at all.

Again

The morning nap. I rocked him till he went to sleep, then he woke up and cried when I put him down. I left the room and for about twenty minutes he was alternately playing, quiet, or crying (but he never got hysterical), and then he fell asleep. This is genius! I left his room at 9:00, and it's now 9:45. . . . Annnnnd I spoke too soon. He's up. Sigh. Still, I consider it progress. He never falls asleep on his own, and we've never let him cry it out, because we don't feel comfortable with it (sometimes I wish I did). This new way doesn't feel like crying it out. I don't know what's changed, I guess I'm just following his cues and doing what feels right in the moment. I would never have put him down and left like this two weeks ago. I feel like our travels last week were really good for all of us. We were forced to help him go to sleep differently, and he ended up being put down a lot sooner than usual, as in not rocked endlessly. (We didn't have a workable rocker, and rocking on a couch is brutal on the back, we discovered.)

He's still asleep!

The first nap today was unusual in its development. He usually goes down fairly regularly--between 9:00 and 9:30--but it looked like this one wasn't going to take, even though he was obviously exhausted. He cried for a few minutes when I rocked him, then fell asleep, only to wake up when I put him down. I decided to leave him in his crib and let him cry for a few minutes, with ten being the max I had in mind. I had turned on the music when I started rocking him (that's one of the new rituals we're trying to do, in place of my singing to him, which makes it harder for other people to put him down). He was in there longer than ten minutes, but he wasn't really crying at first, so I waited until he sounded upset. I went in and tried to rock him, but he was kicking and not happy about being rocked. So I laid him down one more time, left his room and closed the door, and lo and behold, he fell asleep after a few (10?) minutes. What's really insane is that he's now been down for an hour, which is twice as long as he usually naps. I heard him cry out a couple of times, and I went in to get him, only to discover that he was still asleep. Oh, please, let this be a turning point. I should know by now not to get my hopes up after a single occurrence of something, but I can't help it. Maybe this is progress!