By a reasonable standard of “month”, which we’ll take to be 30 days, we’ve now made it. There’s something like a reasonably routine developing around here. The boy’s naps are more predictable, he goes to sleep around 10 or 11 at night, and will sleep for 4 to 5 hours at a go.
We’ve also learned that sometimes nothing will settle him when he’s fussy. Its cliched, but remembering the bit about “grant me the serenity to accept those things that I cannot change” has never been more true than here. There’s something very physiological that his cry induces, and if you’re thinking “I have to fix this”, you’re going to suffer when it can’t be fixed. So now we go through a checklist of sorts when he begins crying. Is he hungry? Is he dirty? Does he have gas? Does swaddling, shushing, side, shake, or suck (from here) calm him? If not to all of the above, then we have to assume that he’s just going to cry for a while, and let him. This procedure is difficult to follow, of course — there’s that physiologic response to that cry, and being physiologic, its not going anywhere — but when we can, it seems to result in shorter, though more intense, periods of fuss, and longer naps afterward.
In other news, we received a nice summary sheet from the clinic telling us about how our baby would be developing for the next 4 weeks. A wonderful bit of information on the sheet was “Don’t leave your baby in the care of other children, OR PETS” (emphasis ours). Once you become disillusioned enough in this world, you realize that advice like this only appears because someone, somewhere, was stupid enough to do the obviously bad thing. Well, just to be sure, we “experimented” with leaving Elliott in Molly’s care. The results speak for themselves.
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