Please Just Sleep!

Before I started teaching preschool, a friend warned me that preschool takes over your life. It hasn't quite taken over my life, but between being a mom of two and preschool, my "me time" to blog and do projects is vanishing. I've written many posts in my head, but I never found the time to publish them. Some of them were brilliant and funny if I say so myself. Today I'm working on basics. Gavin is almost six months old, so I have a little catch up to do.


Dallin started sleeping through the night at 10 weeks. I thought I was a fabulous mother. I have since learned that some things have nothing to do with me. Dallin has always been a good sleeper and he needs his sleep. Gavin though, doesn't need sleep. He is a happy, laughing baby, and he never sleeps the recommended amount. He is also a very early riser. Gavin's lack of sleep and early rising is driving me nuts!!!

Though out the month of October, I started to really work and putting Gavin back to sleep during the night without feeding him. We started making some progress and then day light savings hit in November. For a whole week I had both Gavin and Dallin up at 5 a.m. Dallin eventually started adjusting, but Gavin will still wake up at 5 a.m. Now I have learned a couple of tricks about Gavin and I can put him back to sleep with a new wake up time of 6:30 a.m. In November though, Gavin would wake up giggling and hyper. Both Zane and I would try anything to get him back to sleep. After an hour and a half, he would go back to sleep but by then Dallin was awake. Let me tell you that giggling at 5 a.m. isn't the sound you want to hear. Gavin's early waking though was the least of our problems compared to his frequent waking at night.

I've already posted that Gavin had bronchitis in November. The medicines that Gavin had to take really affected his sleeping too. For a couple of weeks, Gavin was up every hour and a half. His breathing was so labored, that we kept him in his car seat by our bed. He slept better in his car seat and this way I wasn't trampling through my house every half hour. It would take Zane or I 15 to 20 minutes to get him back to sleep, we would lay back done, and then it felt like seconds later, he was awake again. We are now down to two breathing treatments a day to continue to help clear out Gavin's lungs. I mentioned before that Gavin was really good during breathing treatments as long as you sang a song and tried to entertain him. Now he is so tired of it, he acts like every other baby and cries...a lot. We do so many breathing treatments that Dallin has become intrigued by the neutralizer and every thing to do with it.

This is Gavin's mask turned upside down.

Eating and sleeping go hand and hand for a baby, so I need to add a note about Gavin's eating habits. Gavin is a chunky baby and yet, he doesn't eat much. A two ounce cereal feeding replaces a 6 ounce bottle for Gavin. With two cereal feedings, we started dropping bottles quickly. Gavin still needs those bottles though, so he wanted them at night. With both Dallin and Gavin, we have always done a dream feed at 11 p.m. (Gavin goes to bed at 7:30 and we get him out of bed at 11 p.m. to feed in order to keep him from waking up during the night. He usually sleeps through this feed.) Dallin dropped that feed by 3 months. This is Gavin's biggest bottle though so we haven't been able to drop it. Because of this feed, we go to bed late at our house.

November can be characterized as the month I walked around like a zombie. (Zane had one out of town trip in November and it about killed me to do all the wake ups on my own.) Now we are in December and I feel like we have Gavin's sleeping habits back to where they were in October (slightly better since I can put him back to bed at 5 a.m.). Hopefully by the end of this month, Gavin will no longer wake up at 5 a.m.!