Night Waking - an Update

Ezra spent his first night away from both of us last week; in fact, he spent three full days without seeing either of us. This may not seem like a big deal to some of you, but the longest he had previously spent without either of us present was about 8 hours. So this was a leap for the poor little Tookie.

Exacerbating the problem was that Ezra caught some virus or other before we were to leave, effectively fouling up some well-laid plans. Previous to "the Sickness," he was down to only nursing when he woke up in the morning (and that was mostly so we could stay in bed longer). When he got sick, he wanted more comfort, and I gave it to him, willing my milk to give him good antibodies or T-cells or whatever it is he would need to feel better.

He actually did very well; he didn't have any symptoms other than an unnervingly high fever (103 when his medicine was wearing off). Apparently he did a lot of laying on my mom and watching Backyardigans. I don't care; I was able to be an adult doing adult things for 3 days - so crazy! I do wish I could have a 48-hour period without Ezra where I'm not also working 10 hours/day, but it was still so much easier than it would have been with E present.

Anyway, I got E on Saturday, and Stephen came back (and brought Django the dog home) on Sunday, so we're finally getting back into our routine. I was supposed to come back with S on Sunday, but by Saturday afternoon, E was fed up with my mom (she thinks E thought she was holding on him with breastfeeding! Totally possible for my boy), and my dad's novelty was fast wearing off. It was a rough day or two after we were reunited; E wouldn't stop begging to nurse and would pitch fits anytime I said no (which was somewhat often bc he was asking like every hour and a half) or whenever I ended a nursing time (45 minutes is long enough!). I know he was just making up for lost closeness in his very favorite way, but we're having to get him used to how it was before we went away.

It's funny; I think E knew how much I was looking forward to sleeping through the night at our staff "retreat" (yearly planning time) and decided to start sleeping through the night himself like 10 days before we left. Well, he doesn't wake up until the morning I'd say 4 or 5 nights a week, which is still AMAZING to me!

The only difficulty is that he doesn't quite make it all the way to 6:30 - he's been waking up at 5, too tired to get up, but too awake to go back to sleep. He's too squiggly to stay in our bed (Stephen saves up his grace-giving for later in the day) but won't let me leave him in his crib... So it's been a little frustrating. I'm hoping he'll push that later and later until it's no longer an issue. He'll finally go back to sleep for a while, but it's just so sad to almost get a full night's sleep, but not quite. Soon and very soon, I'm sure.

Anyway, I know I've done a lot of complaining about my Mr. TooBusyToStayAsleep on here; I wanted to share some encouraging bits about it. I don't know why exactly it happened now (probably a mixture of cutting down on his ability to nurse; a new way of putting him down; and some magic formula of age, finally eating more food, and... God's grace?), but I'm glad we're getting closer to normal little boy sleep and farther from big baby sleep. :)