Today....

Today is our 15 week milestone! So exciting but so sad at the same time. This mommy has to return to work tomorrow. Tear. The long awaited maternity leave is over and real life must commence. I'm going to miss the little guy; especially our great morning times. I was in tears all day yesterday after I got an email from my supervisor with my schedule. Reality hit me that I was going to have to start thinking about other things beside him. Let me tell you, Finn did not like seeing me cry!

So much has happened over the last week! We are starting to initiate Peek-a-Boo, engage in cause and effect activities/toys (the gumball machine I got him here), and I mentioned last week here, that Finn is now sleeping through the night! Hallelujah! He occasionally wakes up at some point in the night but will put himself back to sleep until he wakes for his 5 am feed, then sleep again until about 8:00. I'm loving catching up on my lost sleep over the last several months. 

And now....I'm going to give you my thoughts on all this sleep stuff now. Are you ready? I honestly believe that parenting is a give and take between parent and child. I learned this in my years of working with children birth to three and their families. We need to feed off of their strengths to help them through their weaknesses. However, sometimes they will need extra guidance and boundaries from us. And they thrive off of that! For some, kids will naturally fall into a sleeping rhythm, but others need to be taught. In our situation with sleeping, I had to give Finn some boundaries and teach him, not just let him guide me and be in control. He had no idea what he was doing! Getting up 4-5 times a night to eat was not okay, especially since he wasn't eating that much during the day. I put my foot down and Ferberized him. It worked in one night! I also used this idea for napping and getting him to nap longer. When he would wake up at 30-60 minutes, I would let him fuss and cry it out a bit to go back to sleep for another hour. It's not easy listening to my sweet baby cry, but as long as I know he is safe I know I'm helping to give him the precious gift of sleep to help him grow and learn. We had it easy in that Finn was already going to sleep just fine at night on his own, he'd just wake up a ton; that helped a lot.  Now to answer some questions, I don't make him sleep when he's not tired, just when I see it coming on during the day. Nighttime is pretty much a set time and he's so tired from the day by then. He's slowly starting to fall into a schedule that we've created together, and life is getting so much easier in that department! Just in time for me to start working again!

That's it for my weekly check in other than this: 

I love this baby more than I ever knew possible!

lauren