Yesterday I took Jack to Chuck E. Cheese, where a friend of mine's daughter was having her 2-year birthday party. That's the birthday girl, Diana, in the picture above with my friend Lily. If Jack could have stopped sucking on his shirt for 2 seconds it would have been a great picture. This was actually the first time I had ever been to a Chuck E. Cheese, since back in my day it was Showbiz Pizza. Not much has changed--still an overwhelming chaos of loud noises, flashing lights, and those creepy singing mechanical animals.
We've done some work this past week on adjusting Jack's sleep schedule, and so far it seems to be working. We had been having trouble over the past couple months; he would wake up sometimes 4-5 times per night and often wouldn't stay down very long once we put him to bed. I did some reading and figured out that we'd been putting him to bed too late at night, which wound up with him being too wired to stay asleep for very long. Plus I was also getting up with him every single time he cried, and he wasn't learning to go back to sleep on his own.
We backed up his bedtime a couple hours, and now he goes down around 7-7:30 pm (so for anyone calling our house phone--please call before 7:00!) We had some crying at first, but now he entertains himself until falling asleep if he's not already asleep when I put him in the crib. We also let him cry through some of his wake-ups when I knew he didn't need to be fed, and now he's not waking up nearly as much in the night. The past few nights he's slept all the way through until about 4 am, taken a quick feeding, and then gone back to bed until 7 am. So now all of us are starting to feel more rested :)
I feel bad because looking back, I realize that many evenings when I thought Jack was just being cranky, he was actually tired and should have been put to bed! Oh well. We'll just chalk this up to another learning experience as first time parents!
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