My little man . . .

I guess the appropriate beginning to my return to the blog would be talking about James. He's my baby. He's kind of awesome. Of course, any mom is probably partial to their own creation, but I do love my James. He is a fat, happy, giggling, cuddly (sometimes), loud, soft, sweet baby, who is growing up way too fast. Here are all the good things about James:

~He loves to laugh. And be happy. And smile. And all things that are good. This is one happy baby. Not necessarily always "content" (he is a wiggler), but he is pretty easy to keep happy. He is also ticklish, which is adorable. He really doesn't cry much at all.

~He loves all the things other babies hate. Bath time. Getting his diaper changed. His car seat. His crib. Etc. This baby is just so . . easy. I have seen so many other babies scream at the very notion of getting bathed or changed, and I feel so blessed that James is totally cool with so much of the things we have to do.

~He is a good eater, and has been for a long time. Not necessarily forever. But after about week five, he totally got the hang of breastfeeding and decided he was going to be a totally awesome eater. The same seems to be true for solids. He was a little hesitant at first with the solids (and rice cereal doesn't agree with his belly, but we moved on from that), but he eats really well now. Except green beans. But everyone is allowed to have something they don't like, food-wise.

~He goes down so easily for sleeping. This baby was HAAAAARD to sleep train (and I use that word referring only to conditioning a child to the circumstances under which you would like them to sleep. I am in no way referring to cry-it-out. Let's get that straight.) But all our work and effort has paid off beautifully and this baby is a dream to put down. Just a little bit of holding for a nap, and for bedtime, you can pretty much just drop him in the crib after he is calmed down and he will just fall asleep 100% on his own. Pretty bomb.

~His amazing ability to make everyone around him happy. I don't know if I have ever seen a baby that has quite this level of therapeutic capabilities. I mean, many people like holding babies. And a lot of people smile instinctively whenever they see one. But this boy, he just seems to bring people joy. Pure joy. He is so generous with his smiles and laughter that he puts people at ease. He helps people feel better when they are having a bad day. I have a therapy baby.

~The cuteness. Seriously. It is just too much:

Now, the thing that is not-so-great about James. Yes, I said the thing. As in singular. As in, I have had one bane to my existence for the last seven-and-a-half months, but, thankfully, only one. Sleeping. Yes, I realize I previously stated that this baby went down easily. Which he does, and has done so relatively well for several months. It is the staying asleep. I think we had about three months of normal, consistently getting better sleep habits. I daresay that we even had a few seven or eight hour stretches there. Before things got bad. Really bad. Like, what-the-crap-is-wrong-with-this-baby bad.

It just started one night. Just totally out of the blue, no warning. He woke up. So I went in and put him back down.

And he was up again an hour later. And an hour later. Every hour.

All night long. And it just kept going.

Every night. For months. And months.

Until I though my brains might explode out of my head from exhaustion and frustration and fatigue and desperation and all of those terrible, awful emotions that exist in so many mothers. The emotions that make you feel so guilty for feeling them, because they are about a small, helpless child that, despite all the awful things that happen, you still love so much, somehow.

So, I say that it continued for a very long time, but it did gradually get better. Bit by bit. I mean, in the grand scheme of things. I could look back on a week of his nights and see no improvement, but over the course of a month, there was a general ease of the exhaustion. It got easier for him to go back down at night. And it happened (maybe a little bit) less often.

But of course, this bane of my existance could not be a complete bane without disruption in all facets of his sleep. So about a month to a month and a half after the sleepless nights came, so did the sleepless days. Again, I am not referring to difficulty in putting him down. The ease in putting him down for naps has been consistent for a very long time.

I am talking about the 45-minute intruder. And intruder is the nicest term I can think of because it really deserves a lot more vicious label. Because it is a life-ruining monster of death and destruction.

Basically, it goes like this. James goes down for a nap (any nap, it doesn't matter). Then I go down for my nap (because let's not forget his night time sleeping is still awful and I am still tired, too). Then, right around 40-45 minutes into the nap, he just inexplicably wakes up. Sometimes he would be chatty and happy, sometimes it was like someone flicked him and he was very unhappy. Either way, it would always result in an overtired, unhappy baby and an overtired, unhappy mama.

I half-heartedly fought the battle to try to get him to go back to sleep. This was hell on earth. Sometimes I would be in his room for an hour and a half, just trying to get him to sleep, or stay asleep longer than five minutes, just to run out of time for a nap and have to get him up to feed him. Ugh, I shudder to remember those dark days. Worst.

Fortunately, we are at a happy place now. The best possible thing I did for his night-time sleep was stop feeding him in the night. I don't think I could have done it any earlier than when I did, because he was still taking a generous feed until we started him on solids at six months. Then he didn't seem to be eating much in the middle of the night. When I cut him off, he had a couple nights of a lot of waking up, but then he snapped right out of it and it became the norm to just have him wake up once or twice and just need a binky and a pat on the chest, then off again to dreamland.

The naps drastically improved after we dropped the third nap of the day. Again, I don't know how I could have made that work any sooner. We started doing that after his solid meals were getting enough inside him (instead of just on his face) that he was getting enough to make whole meals out of solids and not a combination breastfeed/solid feed.

Now he is pretty reliable. We even got to the point, after much trying and crying (me crying, not him) that he goes back down for naps pretty easily if we wakes up too early.

So, yeah, a little rant about the most difficult thing about James. But things are pretty good now. I will continue talking about things being good in the next post :)