Here is a side by side comparison (or top to bottom) of little Billy and his Mother when she was a baby. In case you can't tell, Antoinette is the bottom picture. While there are clear differences, after looking at my baby picture and these two, it is clear that at this age, he looks a lot more like his Mother than he does his Father. You'll have to form your own conclusion though.
Moving along, this week was a crazy one. Antoinette began her new job. What she has been doing the past couple weeks was merely orientation. To say that there will be some adjusting to the hours at this new job is a major understatement. Antoinette's internal clock prevents her from sleeping before work, so by the time she gets home, she's typically been up for a solid 24 hours. Due to the demands of her job, I wind up taking the baby on the nights she's working. My first day on the job was Monday.
Knowing me as well as most of you do, you know that I'm always up for a little experimenting. Billy had a few moments over the past month and a half where he would get a good 6 hours or so of sleep, but lately, he had clearly regressed to the point where 3-4 hours was a bit more likely. Something was wrong here. Babies at 3 months old should generally be sleeping through the night, so I figured maybe we were doing something wrong. On top of that, I wasn't thrilled about the idea of getting up 2-3 times during the night either and then going to work.
So I established a game plan. I decided that I would feed him about 2 hours before bedtime. Then we would have our awake time and then rather than laying him down before his final feeding, I would do whatever it took to keep him awake. Finally, we'd have one more 3-4 ounce bottle feeding and then he'd go down. The first night we tried this, Billy stirred a bit in his sleep, but since he wasn't crying, I just let him be. Twice there was no crying, so there was no feeding. The third time he woke up, he was definitely hungry. So we got up and he got changed and fed, but ultimately, he got 6 hours and 45 minutes of sleep, which was nearly double what he had been getting before we started this.
The next day was Wednesday night and to make sure the first time wasn't a fluke, we tried the same thing. This time he slept for 7 hours and 45 minutes which was new record for him. After that, he slept for another 2 hours before I had to wake up to get him to Antoinette. Nearly 10 hours straight with a 20 minute pit stop in the middle. Since then, Billy is consistently getting 6-8 hours of sleep a night, the number of naps has dropped, but the length of each nap is increasing. Today he took one of his longest naps ever, which was about 3 hours long. Sometimes we have some minor hiccups, such as him falling asleep during his final feeding, which leads us to try every trick we can to keep him drinking. Seems like a full belly and a lack of energy equals a full night sleep for the little guy. Makes sense. It also seems like we were getting up to feed him and change him on every peep that came out of cradle/Pack N' Play. Once we decided to only get him when he was crying, he began to just fall back asleep.
Billy's motor functions are also increasing. He's beginning to grab onto his baby bottle when he's feeding, opens and closes his hands a lot more, and is grabbing on things in front of his face. His Tummy Time is seeing him in a push up position a lot more. He can get his head significantly off the ground now and enjoys looking around from that position for awhile. You can tell his neck has increased dramatically in strength from just a month ago. His ability to control his giant head (relatively speaking, of course) is also improving. But his Father was born with a large head too, so I feel his pain.
Vocally, for the past two weeks he has been using some consonant sounds that make it seem like he's saying "Mom" or "Momma", but more than likely it just sounds like that. This week, he began moving to the "d" sounds and he's been uttering something that very, very, very remotely sounds like "dada". Hey, a man can dream, right? Its Dada to me...even though it could be anything to him. He's also laughing and giggling a lot more and he seems to have become a lot more ticklish behind his neck, on his sides, and on his thighs.
Anyway, yesterday Billy reached 100 days old. Seems odd that he's been around that long already. Sometimes it feels like he's been here longer, but most of the time it feels like we're still getting used to having him. Maybe its because of our constantly changing schedule. Or maybe its because there are so many places I want to take him, things I want him to see, etc. Sometimes you think about not being able to wait until he can control his head, or crawl, or read, or run around. And then other times, we just want to sit back and enjoy every second of his growth and development and wonder what we're in such a hurry for. I figure, once its done and over with, we can never go back, except through this blog, through our videos, and in our minds, so really, what is the rush?
Our friends and family were right. Having a baby is a life changing event and one that it certainly helps to be ready for. But those changes are certainly for the better and after having a child it just seems like this is what it was all about all along. Anyway, until next week...
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