Finally...

I've admitted in prior blogs that the first 4 months of Mason's life have been some of the toughest I've dealt with. I knew having 2 children would be tough, but as usual, I didn't quite know just how tough. Having a newborn and a 3-year old starting the terrible 3's was crazy enough, but adding in a husband in grad school, tummmy troubles from the baby, and months of sleep deprivation made it borderline insane. But after almost 5 crazy months, I think we finally have some resemblence of peace and happiness in this house. Mason's bowel movements are looking much more like they should. I can tell pretty fast when I've eaten something that has dairy in it, but he rebounds pretty quickly as long as it was a one time occurance. The soy is a little more difficult to determine when I eat, but as long as I stay diligent about my menu its not a big deal. We've also gotten a break from Todd being in school because he took the summer off. While it would be nice for him to finish school earlier, he was burned out from working and going to school for the past year and our family needed a break as well. Its been nice for him to come home from work and just relax instead of living on his computer and phone doing school work.

 The biggest news in our house is that Mason is finally (FINALLY!!) sleeping through the night. I probably could have dealt with the challenges we've faced over the past 5 months if I had been able to sleep. Unfortunately, I am not one of those lucky people who can function on less than 8 hours of sleep. Having not slept well in many months was wearing me down emotionally and physically and I was almost at my breaking point when Todd and I started discussing sleep training. I read 4 different books about sleep training since this was something I knew nothing about. We tried the non cry-it-out methods first and unfortunetly saw no progress. We would spend an hour getting Mason to sleep just to have him wake up 2 hours later and it was frustrating. He was still waking up at least one time per night and we thought he might be hungry. So I woke up to feed him and would wearily crawl back into bed just to be woken up in another hour or 2 by Aubrey. I realized Mason was getting too much milk with this overnight feeding because he was spitting up more during the day. I continued to read more about sleep and learned that he was probably waking up after a sleep cycle and couldn't put himself back to sleep. By running in his room when he woke up, we were becoming a crutch (along with the paci) that he needed to go back to sleep. After 2 weeks of 0 progress, I broke down and read about doing modified cry-it-out. I was so against this method because the thought of listenting to a baby cry for hours is worse than nails on a chalkboard. But, desperate times call for desperate measures so I did some research and we created our game plan to get started. We also decided to take the paci away at night so he could truly learn to sleep with no crutches. The first night he cried for 30 minutes (we checked on him at 3, 5, 7, and then 10 minutes) before finally going to sleep. That was the longest he ever cried from then on out. He finally slept through night after the 2nd night of training and we sighed a huge sigh of relief from gettting 7 straight hours of sleep for ourselves. We did sleep training with naps starting at the same time as bed time, but it took 3 weeks to see progress with naps. We struggled with the 30 minute cap naps and a super cranky overtired baby during the day, but managed because we were getting the sleep at night. Finally, this week something clicked for him and we've started seeing some 1+ hour naps. As long as he gets one good nap during the day, he is much happier and chill. We are finally seeing the happy baby we knew was hidden behind the fussy, overtired baby. And, we can handle the other stressors in our life because we are feeling back to our old selves again after a few weeks of better sleep. He still has a night here or there where he wakes up in the middle of the night, but he can usually put himself back to sleep fairly quickly without us having to check on him.

 I think our little family is finally at a good place. I know there will be more challenges to come, but for now I am going to enjoy this happiness and soak it in.