Swim Lessons and Sleep

Wow...is our boy really 4 months old today? It's crazy how time is flying! It's funny because I've always heard that once you have kids you won't be able to imagine your life without them - well for me, I can hardly remember my life before Kellen. Really! Perhaps it's just the lack of sleep!

I so wish I could find a way to get him to sleep through the night. I guess technically he is because the technical definition of sleeping through the night is sleeping for 5 hours. Well, my friends....that is NOT sleeping through the night in my book! Typically he goes to bed around 8pm and then wakes up somewhere between 1-3am. I feed him, he goes right back to sleep and wakes up again around 5am for another feed, then right back to sleep until he's up for good between 7-8am. He has also been a fairly good napper - we see he's tired because he yawns or rubs his eyes and might get a big cranky, so we put him down and he drifts off to sleep. Lately he has not been the best napper and he has also been waking up more frequently in the night. At nap times he's figured out that he loves to be in my arms while he naps and has been almost refusing to take a nap in his crib. At night we have been playing the pacifier game...where about a half hour after I've fed him in the middle of the night, he cries out and I come into the room to replace the pacifier and give him a comforting pat. Sometimes we do this 4-5 times throughout the night. Occassionally I give up if it's after 5am and just bring him into our bed for some guaranteed sleep. Our pediatrician says that he is probably just wanting a little company because he's old enough and big enough to nutritionally sleep through the night (meaning at least 8 hours). So, wanting to try and figure this out...I checked some books out at the library - The Sleep Easy Solution and the No Cry Sleep Solution. The first is a Cry It Out sleep method and the second obviously isn't. Once again, both of these books have stressed me out a bit. Basically according to the first one we are doing everything wrong by giving the boy bad sleep associations. These include:

1. Sucking to sleep - check, we use a pacifier!


2. Swaddling - check, we just bought the next size up SwaddleMe and also basically put him in a straight jacket before wrapping the SwaddleMe around him!


3. Music - check, we always play a soft lullaby cd when he naps.

Ugh!!

The second book is more of an attachment parenting philosophy and most of the suggestions include things that we are already doing - although she also recommends slowly getting rid of the pacifier. Hmmm....our peditrician actually says we don't need to worry about the pacifier or the swaddling - he'll tell us when he's ready to be done swaddling and that he has a strong sucking reflex and don't need to worry about the pacifier until he's around 1. So once again I have all these different opinions and I'm not quite sure what to do. The comical thing is that as I sit here typing this he's in his crib napping and it's almost been two hours - so maybe we don't really have a problem!!??

Okay...onto more fun things like swimming! We had our first swim lesson today. Aa went into the pool with him and they both did great! I think that Kellen might have been one of the youngest babies in the class. He didn't cry and seemed to really enjoy the water. They had a lot of fun little games/songs to just get the kids used to the water. No dunking yet, although I know that will come later! Aa will go in with him on the Saturdays he's not working and I'll go in with him the others. It's fun because two of my running friends from work are also taking the lessons with their sons! Here are a couple of pictures from the pool and I'm working on getting a video uploading.