Babe Wisdom

I have an endorsement to make. As anyone who's been reading my blog knows, our sweet little darling Wyatt can be a bit of a handful in the fussiness department. My s-i-l babysat him last week and confirmed that he's challenging. :) Which was a relief to Ryan and I, because she's an experienced mother of 2, which means maybe we're not just baby-wimps. Well, we've gone around in circles trying to figure out why our child gets so weepy all the time. And then we started reading a book that our friends recommended. It's called On Becoming Baby Wise. And we realized what the problem was. Wyatt fights sleep. He doesn't generally just fall naturally to sleep when he's tired. And so, by the end of the day, if he's napped at all, they've been cat naps. So he's overly tired and cranky. And those strange intervals of fussiness throughout the day? Yeah...those are the times he needed to be put down for a nap. A real nap. Not just a quick doze in the swing before he eats. We've started following the loose schedule set up in Baby Wise, and have discovered a much happier baby boy.

Here's what's funny: The information in Baby Wise is really the same stuff my friend Talitha, who's a doula, has been telling me all along. I recognize the loose scheduling (which is a welcome and logical balance between the hyper-scheduling camp and the attachment parenting philosophy, both of which are based on flawed logic and extremism... I'm sure I'll piss someone off by saying that...) as the same recommendations she's given me. When she advised me last time though, I was still in the midst of baby blues and general unfamiliarity with my child, so I didn't quite understand how to implement it, and I wasn't really completely capable of understanding it. :)

So, anyway, kudos to Brian and Lesa for recommending the book to us, and to Talitha for giving us the same advice even without a book! We now have a child who naps, who isn't so psycho in the evenings and a hour after every meal (turns out, it had nothing to do with his tummy), and who is already sleeping a little longer each night. I'm starting to feel more confident about the fact that my child may be sleeping all the way through the night in a few weeks. (Knock on wood.)

Our almost 7 week old: