Sleep Wars

I finally feel safe to write about this topic now that we have an established bedtime routine that seems to be working. Our typical night goes as follows: Chris comes home from work, we eat dinner together, go on our family walk around the neighborhood (stroller + 2 dogs), tummy time, bath time, feeding time, bed by eight. What now seems so simple was the impossible 2 months ago!
When we first brought home our baby from the hospital, we weren't expecting to get much sleep. But regardless, there was a routine to how things went that we were both able to adapt too. The first few weeks he typically woke up every 3 hours during the night to be fed. However, he would go into what we jokingly referred to as a "milk coma" and knock right back out piece of cake. The routine became so easy that I didn't mind waking at 11:00pm and 2:00am to spend these extra moments with my son. I'm not going to lie and say I was thinking "oh goodie" each time and I was definitely dragging on occasion, but there was always the promise of the sooner I fed him, the sooner he would go back to sleep. We even got to the point around four weeks where he would sometimes sleep for four to six hours at a time during the night! We felt like we were done with the "worst of it" until week six hit. And then everything changed...
I don't remember when it first started happening. This whole time period was kind of a blur. We always had trouble initially getting him to go to sleep, and we decided around week six that it was time to move him into his own room (up until this point he had been sleeping in a bassinet in our room). This way, once he fell asleep he would hopefully stay asleep without the worry of us unintentionally waking him up. And we would sleep a little better too not listening for every sound/noise that he happened to make (babies make a lot of strange sounds in their sleep!). We were also excited to use the web camera Chris had hooked up in the room which wound up documenting this lovely time period for us.
So....this is how our nights went. We would feed him and put him down around 8:00 or 8:30pm. He would fuss for a bit and then fall asleep. Right around 9:30 or 10:00 he would wake up crying/screaming which would continue until 1:30 or 2:00am!! Yep. Every night. For I believe six to eight weeks straight. One time it was 3:30am before he finally fell asleep. And we tried everything. Walking him around, rocking him, waiting it out for a bit (that never worked), nursing continuously, you get the idea. And the best part was that once he did fall asleep, he would sleep five, six hours no problem. However, sleeping from 2:00am-7:00am every night and still having to be a person the next morning and do my normal routine (walk the dogs, feed the baby, clean the house), however simple, turned me into a zombie. I'm still surprised we were able to function and do things on the weekend. And I was soo glad that I was not teaching that summer because I can't imagine having a job to report to after nights like that.
The silver lining is that it did get better. Lots better. Now the bedtime routine is one of our most treasured moments of the day because he is so calm and happy, and dare I say it but he actually enjoys sleep!
While the new schedule took some adjusting too, I would still find myself wide awake at 11:30, 12:00 almost unconsciously keeping myself awake lest I be summoned by my child, I can now safely say that I am getting plenty of sleep and feel "normal" again. Of course, everything is a new kind of normal, but that's just as it should be.


Oh, and I took pictures....

 not so sure about going to sleep

asleep

wakes up (resting the vocal chords before the fun begins)

some interesting sleeping positions after some crazy all nighters...

next morning...

What's good?