Sleepless In...

pretty much wherever we are...unless Little Dude is in bed with Mommy. Bed sharing was never in my plans. Ever. Until LD started to refuse to sleep any other way. A few weeks after birth we had this sweet baby who slept through the night no problem. I know those of you who read my blog and battled with no sleep early on wanted to slap me. Starting about 6 months it came back to bite me in the ass. We thought it was just a growth spurt and hoped things would even out in a few weeks. They didn't. They got progressively worse. Including nights where LD would wake up and scream bloody murder for hours, even when you were holding him. Enter a trip to the pediatrician. He claimed it was separation anxiety. Little Dude was at an age where he would wake up and realize he was alone and be upset. I wasn't exactly convinced since he is sleeping in our room and we'd pick him up and the screaming would continue. It was bad. DH and I were at our wits end. We were exhausted. We would end up with LD on our chests in bed and then we would sleep poorly, worried he was going to roll off, get crushed, etc. But it was the only way to get any sleep even if was poor. So we turned to cry it out. I was not excited about this at all. But desperate times call for desperate measures. And after 56 excruciating minutes(remember he's sleeping in our room so we're front row for the screaming) he fell asleep. The next night was closer to half an hour and then less than 15 minutes the third night. Wow was I impressed. Then he and I left for vacation. *Sigh* Enter sleep problems again. I couldn't do CIO at my parents because a)grandparents die a little inside when their grandkids cry, seriously, they could not just let him cry b)my dad works at 5am so I couldn't let LD cry and keep him awake. So here we are freshly returned from vacation and I think we have to start over with CIO again.

Here we are at 9 months and Little Dude transitioned from the army man crawl, to a real crawl, to cruising furniture in a short matter of weeks. He's pretty unstoppable and any little thing on the floor goes directly into his mouth. He's also quite persistent. If you tell him no and take him away from something he'll ignore it just long enough for you to forget about it and then be right back there messing with it again. No words yet. Solids are going well. He prefers the smoother purees to the thicker textures and fruits to veggies but we're working to expand his palette. We're still looking for a sippy that will interest him. I've tried quite a few but none have struck his fancy.

He and I survived our first solo trip. Nearly two weeks long. Most of it was spent in Nebraska with a weekend in Vegas. He's now been on 10 plane rides. He does fabulous. The biggest hassle is all the stuff that comes with traveling with a baby. But we did just fine, although we missed DH so I don't think we'll go by ourselves again anytime soon.