Can't believe it's been soooo long

I cannot believe that it has been so long since I have written.  Life, or more accurately, life events have taken over.  It has been a whirlwind in our house since May with weddings, parties, trips, work, and of course, Michael-dom.  Our little prince has been developing new skills faster than I can type and it has been so incredible to watch. 

In the past 6 weeks, he has sprouted 4 teeth, mastered finger foods, started pulling up, started crawling, swims with Mommy & Daddy, and is doing some serious babbling.  It is really a sight to see!!!

What brings me to the blog today -- a few things. 

1) our beautiful sleeping patterns have gone completely haywire, much to my dismay
2) I am sensing that we may be entering the world of weaning

So- first thing's first...the sleeping.  M was doing an awesome job sleeping.  He took 2 beautiful naps, am & pm, and went to bed at 7pm every night.  He would sleep until about 6/6:30am and would wake up happy (and hungry).  For the past 3 weeks, that has all changed.  He now wakes up at 4:45am every day and has to join us in bed (after a long rocking session) to go back to sleep.  And he has to go back to sleep because he is a cranky terror if we leave him up (we tried - not pretty!).  Plus - he now is super hyper before bed and wants to play, not sleep.  We haven't done the sleep training mostly because his last bottle would put him out but I am definitely ready to start. 

Here is what some research turned up about 9-month-old's and waking:

The average nine-month-old sleeps 14 hours per 24 hours. This is usually divided into a through-the-night sleep of 10 to 11 hours and two naps of at least one hour each during the day. But research shows that 20 to 30 percent of infants at this age are waking at least once per night. 

An understanding of your infant's stage of development and an organized game plan usually help this messy situation. Because while she can babble, sit up, and certainly cry to express some of her wants and needs, your nine-month-old is far from efficient at expressing complicated thought. And sleep disturbance seems complicated. Understanding your baby's stage of development is step one in understanding the problem.
An infant at nine months of age has achieved two developmental milestones which may interfere with independent sleep:

• First, babies have developed object permanence by now. If you take a pen and hide it under a piece of paper, a four-month-old thinks you have made it disappear! A nine-month-old knows to lift up the paper and find the pen underneath. Similarly, a nine-month-old who sees you leave the room during your bedtime routine knows that you are somewhere behind that door. And she knows that there are things that she can do to get you back in the room. Crying is an infant tried-and-true mode of attack.
• Second, infants at nine months of age are often going through a major stage of separation anxiety. Infants can be quite clingy and need lots of reassurance at this age. Many a parent has complained that going to the bathroom without his or her baby glued to the hip is impossible. The intense separation fear that can bubble up at bedtime, then, is understandable.

A Pediatrician says:

When I discuss this issue with parents in the office, the first thing I do is to walk through their bedtime routine with them: "What do you do? And don't spare the details." It turns out that at this age, the last part of the bedtime routine is critical. Infants at nine months can make strong associations with their environment at the time they fall asleep. So an infant who falls asleep rocked and cuddled, can grow to need that rocking and cuddling to fall asleep. Because infants wake and return to sleep many times each night, your bedtime routine can result in an extra effort on your part (rocking and cuddling, in this example) many times each night as your infant wakes up and doesn't know what to do with himself.


Feeding, like motion, is another example of a parent-provided stimulation. For infants who bottlefeed or breastfeed as they fall asleep every night, I encourage parents to move the feeding to an earlier part of the bedtime routine. Instead of bath, tooth brushing, reading, feeding, then bed, I suggest feeding, bath, tooth brushing, reading, then bed. Pacifier use, white noise, or bright light in the room during sleep initiation can cause a similar problem. This issue of "cleaning up the bedtime routine" teaches your infant self-settling—a developmental task that all babies must learn.


As for weaning, we have recently dropped M's mid-morning bottle so he is now getting 4 bottles/day for a total of 27 oz/day. 

• 6am/waking: 7 oz
• 1pm/before nap: 7 oz
• 4:30 or 5pm: 6 oz
• 7pm/before bed: 7 oz

I am highly considering dropping the 4:30pm bottle and giving him a snack instead and then moving dinner to 5:30pm and his final bottle a little earlier to help with his sleep routine.  It is hard to decide because so much of what I am reading says that a baby's main nutrition is still coming from formula but M prefers solids.  Some of my research is telling me that it is ok to drop him to 3 bottles (7 oz each) per day.  I think that we might try it this week and then attempt to start sleep training this weekend so that we can (hopefully) have that mastered by the time I go back to work.  AAAGGGHHHH!!!!!