I’m not useless!

Since Friday, Leah and I have begun a grand experiment with Liam: Every 5 minutes, we bang a gong and hold up a snack Leah no longer nurses him to sleep at night. We started this because it became obvious that the act of breastfeeding was no longer putting him to sleep.

Up until now, the ritual was that I would bathe him, read him a story, then Leah would come up and nurse him to sleep. But lately, that hasn’t been working, and Liam was getting visibly agitated during the handoff – just prior, he would be craning his neck to look for Leah, and then when I left, he’d be craning his neck to look for me, and wasn’t staying nice and relaxed, as a baby about to go to sleep should be.

So as of Friday (although I was out on Saturday), I’ve been doing the whole shebang. I bathe him, read him a story, sing him a couple of songs to relax him (amazingly, Liam seems to like my voice. Possibly he doesn’t know any better), lay him down in the crib and sit with him and soothe him until he goes to sleep.

Friday, he was awake after 30 minutes, and it was hard work to get him back to sleep. Sunday, he feel asleep quickly, but woke up around 12:30 AM, and took nearly 2 hours to get back to sleep. Last night, he was pretty hard to soothe, but once asleep, he slept through the night! 11 hours straight! And Leah didn’t have to nurse him at all!

I was pretty darned proud of myself when I woke up and realized that this morning. This is just a public self-congratulation, I suppose