Progress

Last night I decided to try a little experiment. My Mom Guru friend sent me a really interesting article about "sleep training" which takes a very gentle, gradual approach (and doesn't recommend anything but giving in to baby's wants until at least a year, but I ignored that). It occurred to me that maybe I just need to be very patient and sloooowly move B towards the kind of sleep I want us to get (ie, unbroken). So while I wait for the sleep experts to respond to my email, last night I did this:

Nursed to sleep at 11 PM when B lost interest in playing and started whining out of fatigue.

When he woke up an hour later to feed some more, I let him cry. It sucked. But as recommended by the article I patted his back, hugged him, let him know I was right there, but there weren't going to be any breassesses. He was very angry and frustrated, but after about twenty minutes he rolled into me and went to sleep. Victory!

At 4:30 he woke again and I gave him a good long feed.

At 6:00 he woke again and I let him cry; this time he only cried for a few minutes and again rolled into me and slept.

At 9:00 he woke and I fed him so he could take on the day, then we got up.

He does not appear to be traumatized by not getting what he wanted twice in the middle of the night. I have no idea if I'm doing the right thing or what tonight will bring, I just thought a) I need to slowly reduce the number of night feedings, and b) I can't reduce them all at once because I will end up with hard, painful boobies, and he may actually be legitimately hungry.

So tonight I will do the same - nurse to sleep, offer one feeding in the middle of the night but no more, and one as we wake up. And I'll just keep doing that and see how it goes. It would be so excellent to one day only be woken up once...!

In other news, the windows went in on the attic space yesterday. It is a big step! But the space still won't look like anything until they start putting in the subfloor and drywall. It's still almost impossible to picture. This morning though I did see light coming in through the new windows from under the staircase, and that was kind of exciting. We talked about making the hole in the floor baby safe. It's going to be a challenge.

Yesterday I met with my mommy meet up group. I have made some friendships there and I like how active the group is - two to three meet ups a month, and always interesting things, like museum trips or hikes or downtown exploring. Unfortunately the group leader is moving to Florida in a couple of months, so I asked yesterday what will become of the group and offered to take it on with others. She said that's what she'd hoped, that three or four of us would step up and host events occasionally. So hopefully we can continue!

I was looking at another empty weekend and decided to see a comedy show Saturday night. I have plenty of milk pumped and I'd love a night out not gig-related. So my bandleader friend, his wife and I will go see our favorite comic and have a nice time when I don't have to be on stage or in charge of something. I'm looking forward to that!