Sawyer is a beautiful, delicious, delightful baby. But he hasn't been a walk in the park. His first few months, he seemed like a pretty easy baby -- he didn't cry or fuss too much, he slept really well considering his age, and nursing was the same challenge it's always been (but I had taken the stress off of breastfeeding from the get-go). He was particularly jumpy those first few months; any loud noises or excessive craziness from the girls would scare him and he'd start screaming. But that was the only thing that was remotely hard.
Obviously, newborn sleeping is hard. The night waking is killer. But it wasn't the worst we've ever had. He was a dream compared to Brooke as a baby. 😆
But once he turned 4 months, things got pretty difficult for a while.
The breastfeeding story in short: I started nursing him at 1 month old, and he was just a lazy nurser; not efficient enough to nurse along. I pumped until my birthday, and as my gift to myself, I weaned myself off of pumping in the few weeks up to my birthday so that I could be done ... on my birthday. So, I pumped for 5 months. It was 5 months of nursing, pumping, feeding from a bottle. Now, we still nurse and I still supplement from a bottle, because he still doesn't get enough from me. I am totally good with this arrangement, partly because I have so much stored and frozen breastmilk. It's been a month, and we still have a lot of breastmilk in our freezer, and in Daniel's parent's freezer (they were kind enough to store a lot of it, because our freezer isn't big enough for all of it). And that's where we're at. And I'm contented with this. He has given me at least 6 good months of nursing, we've gotten some good bonding with it, it's helped in putting him to sleep these last months, and so whatever happens from here on out, we've at least done this.
The sleeping is more complicated. We sleep trained a few weeks after he was 4 months old, and it was disastrous. Especially since we had to stop swaddling at the same time because he was rolling. It was a very hard transition for him, and he was back to waking up every few hours. And he didn't seem to be taking well to the training. So, I stopped training him and started swaddling again, with one arm out.
But things didn't improve. So the week after my birthday, we tried again. And in the meantime, naps were going terribly. He wasn't sleeping well at night OR in the daytime. And neither was I. There's been a lot of back and forth try to figure out what to do for him. Last week, I think we turned a corner. He had a few days in a row when he went to sleep without crying at all for bedtime, and he stopped waking up so frequently. He went down to one feeding at night, sometimes late enough in the morning that I got 6+ hours of sleep. I'm sure we still have some bumps to get over. We still have to do nap training -- his naps are still not stellar; he usually misses at least one nap a day because he just wakes himself up or doesn't transfer well to his crib. But at least I seem to be getting most of my sleep at night now. That makes such a huge difference in how I feel and how I manage my emotions.
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