4.25.09 Teething, Sleeping & Eating

Where to go from here? It's not as if I know exactly what I am doing as a parent. Sometimes I think I've got it down but most of the time I'm not so sure. I mostly try to gauge every situation when I come to it. I try to be fair and consistent. It works a lot of the time but lately I feel like I'm just flailing my arms around in circle but not getting anywhere. You'd call that 'almost drowning' if you were in the water. Good thing I'm not.

Right now the issues are teething and sleep for Noah and eating and obeying for Hannah. Yeah I know that I wrote just a few posts ago how Hannah is doing well eating. Apparently I wrote that too soon. Lately she's been holding out for junky or low to no calorie, zero nutrition food. Like, lettuce, Cliff bar kid's bars, maraschino cherries and apple sauce. We don't force her to eat with us on our schedule because that would truly be torture to eat with her complaining or crying the whole time. It's really nice to eat a meal and be able to digest it as it's going down the pie hole. However we'd like her to eat what we are eating and so far we can barely get her to taste what we are eating and it's fairly kid friendly food. She almost refuses to eat it. I'd like to give a little genetic hisitory here and say that as a child I was a good eater. It was Robert who was picky. Today Robert will eat anything as long it's not meat and doesn't smell like barf (parmesean cheese). While I would just like to eat popcorn and chips if I could get away with it.

As for Noah, our baby Noah. He's almost six months old and sleeping like an infant again. He's getting his upper front teeth. It's not been easy on him or I. He's fussy, biting everything. He often grabs me by my hair and tries to shove my chin in his mouth so he can chew on it. Ouch! This also means he's not sleeping well at all and neither am I as a result of his night wakings. Last night I felt like he was just not doing well in all that pain and I tried and tried again to get him to sleep. He did sleep for boughts of 40 minutes. It was really ugly. I slept in our bed downstairs with him while Robert slept upstairs in the office/guest room. He woke up every two hours and then around 3 a.m. he woke up for an hour. I changed his diaper, tried patting him and eventually nursed him and patted him some more with my body wrapped around his. He still woke up and stirred every twenty minutes or so until 7 a.m. Suprisingly I felt pretty normal the rest of the day. I think because I don't get a lot of hours of sleep in a row normally.

I remember this behavior from Hannah and had to look in her baby book to be sure. Lo and behold I was right. Hannah slept just like this when she was teething her upper front teeth too. But she was nine months old. He's just about six month old. With Hannah I endured it through her first upper front tooth but with the second I was just beside myself with exhaustion that we ended up letting her cry to sleep in her crib. It was terrible and tourturous but the worst of it only lasted about ten days. After that she cried when she went to sleep but only for a minute or two.

Our problem with Noah is that he can turn over from front to back but can't get back to front. He takes a pacifier but when it falls from his mouth he can't find it and put it back in yet. So after much thought I decided that we should let Noah cry, but do a modified Ferber method. We go in after an alotted time (15 minutes in our case) and pat and give back the pacifier for two minutes and let him cry again. That way we give him time to fall asleep on his own, but we're also checking on him to make sure that he's okay. We're also going to start by doing his bedtime routine down stairs and switching off Robert and I putting him to bed awake. I'd been taking the easy way out and nursing and bouncing him to sleep but that worked for only 3 weeks until he decided he'd rather look around the room then relax and sleep. This way when we put him down to sleep he does the bulk of the crying right away instead of a sleep cycle or two later (sleep cycles are about 40 minutes). Now we just have to stick to this and hope and pray that he'll get the hang of this sleep thing.