Sacrifice

So, I’ve determined that I can’t eat chocolate and I can’t have caffeine. Both cause my sweet little baby’s tummy to get very grumpy and that isn’t so fun for mom & dad.  Luckily I can survive without caffeine (just need to make sure I have caffeine-free coke on hand) but the no chocolate thing has been sort of hard. And you know I’m making sure Rick knows all about my dietary sacrifices for his son. His response? “Oooooh, so I can finish off those Oreos?”. I performed (and failed) a caffeine test yesterday and Carson was horrible all afternoon – only sleeping if he was in the sling – so here is a picture of Rick multi-tasking (I think multi-tasking for the first time ever? LOL) with Carson in the sling and reading his book.

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Carson has continued to be a good sleeper (at least when his belly is caffeine & chocolate free). He seems to sleep very well on his tummy and since he has such good head control and can roll over (and because we have the baby monitor that alarms if he stops breathing) I don’t have a problem letting him sleep like that sometimes. He’s still sleeping in the pack-n-play in our room but we are trying to put him down in his crib to start the night off. Two nights this week he only woke up for five minutes to eat around 2a and then fell right back asleep. But a couple of nights this week it was back like he was a newborn, when we were in true survival mode just doing whatever we could to calm him down.

I guess this is tied in to the first paragraph above, but Rick is now a big believer in the sling. We’ve had it from the beginning but I could never figure out how to get Carson situated in it. Then I saw a woman at Target with her daughter in this same sling and I was able to get some tips on how to use it. So, anyway, it is now our “go to” calming device for Carson.

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Mallory is actually sleeping better too. I think we only had two mornings this week where she came upstairs needing us to help find her paci. And she seems to not be so distressed about it too. We had a long stretch there where her coming upstairs was a HUGE production of tears and fighting. We were letting her climb into bed with us when she came upstairs because it allowed all of us to get some more sleep. But the past two weeks or so, I’m able to get her right back in bed after I find her pacifier. And this morning, she came up at 5.20a and I was able to put her back in bed; then I checked on her 10 minutes later and she wasn’t asleep yet and I thought for sure she was going to decide it was wake-up time but she ended up going back to sleep for a couple hours (Rick can’t remember what time she actually woke up).