Birthday Boy

My little man is 4 years old today. He just suddenly started looking like a big kid, which is fitting since he is a big kid now. He is suddenly so tall! And handsome.

Izzy wanted a pogo stick for his birthday. John and I thought he would be too little to play with it, but he has been proving us wrong.  He has been bouncing all morning...
It is a cliche, but they grow so fast. I can't believe my baby is so darn BIG.

I hate naps

Life with three really isn't too hard.  I am not trying to sound like I am super mom or anything, because I am not.  But I feel like I manage day to day life fairly well.  The only real problem I face is trying to get the baby to nap for longer than 45 minutes.  Porgie rarely napped at this age and Izzy was also a cat-napper, so maybe it is a genetic thing?

I know it will get better with time, but it is hard to ever get out of the house with this current schedule.  Our day goes like this: baby wakes up, nurses for 10-15 minutes, plays for about an hour, and then I nurse or rock him to sleep.  Sometimes I put him in his swing and sometimes I put him in his crib.  Despite where I put him to sleep, he usually wakes up 30 to 45 minutes later.  If I put him in the swing, he will sometimes sleep for an hour or two, but this is rare (it happens maybe once a week).  This loop continues all day, which means that my baby is going down for FIVE naps every day.  It feels like I am constantly putting my baby to bed, which means that I am spending a large portion of my day in the baby's bedroom, which means my other children are spending a large portion of their day watching television. GAH.

I have tried going in quickly when the baby wakes and rocking him back to sleep.  It doesn't work very well, and just ends up frustrating me and Guppy.  After that 30 minute nap, he really struggles to go back to sleep.  Last Monday John was off work, so I really tried to extend his nap.   For his first nap, I spent 20 minutes getting him to sleep.  He slept for 35 minutes and woke up.  I rushed in and tried to rock him back to sleep.  I spent 40 minutes rocking him!  He finally fell back asleep and slept for 30 more minutes.  So, I spent an hour of my time trying to get him to sleep for an hour.  It hardly seems worth all the effort.

Sleeping arrangements

Guppy and I started co-sleeping on the day he was born. When we brought him home, he slept curdled up right beside me in bed. After he was about 2 weeks old, he started grunting and straining all night long. It was really disturbing my sleep, but we muddled through a few more weeks of co-sleeping.

When Guppy was about a month and half old, I decided to put him to sleep for the night in his car seat (I thought maybe the gruntiness was due to reflux). I kicked John out of the bedroom, put the car seat on his side of the bed, and put my swaddled baby in the seat. The first few nights he slept great, only waking about 2 times. And because he was on my husband's side of the bed, the constant grunting and straining didn't seem to bother me as much. AWESOME! I thought our problems were solved.

But then about 2 week ago Guppy started having trouble at bedtime. He would go right to sleep, and I would transfer him to the car seat. But 20 minutes later he was screaming and crying. The only thing that would calm him was putting him into bed with me and letting him stare at a side table lamp. Over the past week, I stopped putting him in the car seat and just started letting him co-sleep with me again. But he is still waking 20 minutes later, and he is still grunty at night, which is still very disturbing to my sleep. He is better than he used to be, but between the hours of 4am and 7am he is the loudest sleeping baby in world. This basically means that I am awake from 4am almost everyday. UGH.

Now, the ultimate goal is to get Guppy into his crib (in his own room) within the next month or two. I waited until Porgie was 8 months old, and I was utterly exhausted by that time. With Izzy, we used the car seat for sleeping almost exclusively until he was 5 or 6 months old because of all his tummy troubles. He never really slept well in my bed (or in the car seat for that matter), so the transition to his room wasn't hard at all. I have started letting Guppy take a few naps in his crib during the day, but he never sleeps for more than 45 minutes. And he wakes up pissed off. UGH.

So, I am working towards a goal and it is not going to be easy.

Halloween

Apparently I can sum up any entire life in pictures alone.