In any case, the big news I wanted to share in this post is that two days ago, we finally got Leo out of his swaddler for his night time sleep. This is about the same time we broke Max out of his evening prison . . . actually it's about 2 weeks earlier. Now that Leo has rolled over, it's mostly a safety precaution, given that a swaddled roll-over would be pretty disastrous. For awhile now, he's been relatively unhappy at bed time - it could be the swaddling, or it could be general malaise about getting to sleep. I read the posts regarding Max graduating from the swaddling blanket and it said something about him not liking the swaddled position either. It's funny how I don't remember many details about the transition. Which makes me think about back when I worked on the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. The survey asks many questions about development milestones and it always stunned me when there were comments made about parents exhibiting recall error. I figured "Hey, who would forget anything about their child's development?" Now I get it. At the time, every little event is so important...but gradually memories get replaced by others and, possibly with the assistance of sleep deprivation, some of the details fade into nothingness. At the very least, we'll always (I hope) have the words in this blog to help us recapture some of the best times of Max's and Leo's developments.
But I digress.
Even if Leo wasn't a fan of being swaddled, we couldn't really argue with the results - 7-9 hours of sleep a night was certainly better than anything Max ever gave us in the beginning. The first night that went swaddle-free (Wednesday), Holly had gone to sleep a little early and then I put Leo to sleep. I hovered over him playing face-goalie for a few minutes, deflecting his twitching arms until he settled into sleep. Unfortunately, he whacked himself just as I was leaving his room - I was going to go back, but figured that he'd have to try to sort it out on his own. I stayed up for 30 minutes, expecting to have to pick him up and re-settle him, but he never got up. I then went to sleep, figuring I'd need all I could get before Leo'd get up in an hour or two. I woke up to screaming at 2:30. . . except it was Max who needed the soothing. Somehow Leo crashed through the whole episode. In fact, he only got up after 8 hours of sleep. I guess that should be a "!" I would have written about this yesterday, but a) I think we got really lucky and b) I didn't want to jinx the process.
Last night didn't go quite as well. The 10:00 put-down failed and Leo woke up, fairly alert. Holly packed it in and I hung out with Leo until we tried again at 11:15. Sadly, he got up again at midnight and stayed awake until 12:30 or so. His nose was so junky with this cold he's picked up that I thought I'd have to get him with the nasal spray (which would have made me go get Holly for a feeding). I held off though and when we went to sleep, he stayed there until shortly after 6. While this wasn't as good as the swaddle sleep he got previously, I'm still not arguing over 6 hours. Also interesting, in the heat of the moment, it didn't really feel like time was dragging that much, but now I look at this and think "that took 3 hours from first rock to comatose last night . . . 3 freaking hours!!" Crazy.
On some level, it was kind of empowering to be fending for myself after dark last night, trying to soothe Leo without any breast milk (bottle or human automatic dispenser) at my disposal. It seems like we came to a reasonable agreement and I hope it continues over the next little while (or at least please please please for tonight:).
Here's a video showing what I'm trying to defend Leo's face from:
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