Nighttime Adventures

Since Mikey was born we have consistently had nighttime adventures.

Of course we began with the newborn adventures of frequent waking, spitting up, and dirtying the diaper. Then we transitioned into the extremely-sensitive-one-to-three-month-old adventures of frequent crying and rocking and bouncing. I got so tired of rocking Mikey to sleep in the wee hours of the morning that we finally borrowed our neighbors' baby swing and had Mikey sleep in there for two months. Then when Mikey hit three months we transitioned him out of the swing and onto the motionless bed--our bed.


At this point, we became huge proponents of a little gadget called the SwaddleMe (by Kiddopotamus).




Don't be turned off by the fact that it looks like a little straight jacket; this product was a huge help for many months. It really does what it says. Once in our bed, little Michael immediately took to frequent nursing to make it through every partial awakening, which sometimes occurred five or six times a night. At that point I became a desperate woman and began reading different books and websites on baby sleep. For almost four months we tried to change Mikey's sleep in a gentle way, while still employing nursing, bouncing, and co-sleeping. Finally he got too heavy for all the bouncing, so we switched to exclusive nursing. Then I began to get a sore back from all the nursing, and Mike began to get a sore back from all the bouncing; I began to consider moving Mikey into a crib, which we did not yet own. We liked co-sleeping, but it was becoming increasingly disruptive for all of us. And Mikey would not even necessarily sleep the whole night, even with frequent nursing. He would often wake up, nurse a little bit, and then decide to play for an hour. One night he did his little playing trick, and I pretended to be asleep. I think I actually fell asleep because the next thing I knew, he was not next to me anymore, and by the time I sat up, he was happily crawling off the side of the bed. What a shock for both him and me when he hit the floor! That was the last straw. The next day I insisted that we go to Babies "R" Us and find a crib to take home immediately.


Well, we found one that they had in stock and bought it and got Mikey into it two nights later. Little did he know how much his nights were going to change! To be continued....