"Milk coma"
About a 10 minutes walk, behind the temple,
is this hill that overlooks Laie.
The ocean seen in the distance.
Just hanging out.
We finally made it out to the swap meet at the
Aloha Stadium. After making our rounds we were all tuckered out,
but only Sawyer had someone who could carry him around.
A quick park visit before I had to disappear
into the library and lab for the night.
On campus is a small museum. Sawyer saw some new animals!
Man, as of late, the stars, moon, satellites, planets, and grains of sand in the ocean and on the beaches have all really got to align in order for me to get any writing in. It seems impossible to put any updates here. Kudos to you, Mrs. Nat The Fat Rat, and other well known bloggers. (Sarah recently said, "I want to be like Nat The Fat Rat", and is now looking for opportunities to instagram, insisting, "well you're already our blogger").
It's been 2 weeks since my last post, and a big recent baby update is responsible for what you now read.
To set this up, Sarah has a great routine for Sawyer:
Around 7:00 or 8:00 she get's him stripped down to "naked Sawyer" as we accurately call him, and gives him a nice bath.
She then bundles him up into his towel with a hood that makes him look like a little ewok or frog or something, and takes him to our bed.
There, she whips out some kind of smelly good lotion and gives him a little baby massage, making sure to hit all his growing muscles.
After the massage she sits down in our rocker and reads him a story.
Post story comes a nice feeding with, not one, but two servings of the goods.
Now he's ready for bed, and in his crib he goes; this occurs fairly consistently between 8:00 and 9:00. At this point he has the understanding that his next interaction will follow several more times in the night when Sarah promptly awakes to his shuffling and grunts telling us he's in need of some form of comforting.
You can imagine how at peace he must feel with this maternal pampering, especially considering his paternal care consists of dive bombing couches and beds, exercising in the form of squats, front to back rolls, and holding his own bottle, as well as enduring pokes, prods, growls, and weird noises that all attempt to invoke a smile or laugh.
To his dismay, we are adjusting everything that happens after 9:00; we are officially limiting his nightly feedings to none. We are taking the initiative to help him established nightly independence so we (Sarah) can begin to get better rest as well as whatever benefits there are for baby. This week marks his 4th month, and some as early as 3 months are sleeping through the night. Our 1st night trying this was very rough. From what I remember, he woke up at least 3 times, and cried for 20+ minutes each time until we eventually caved in and fed him early in the morning. Tonight will be our 4th night of enduring his screams and pleads for attention. Yesterday, his last feeding was at 9:00pm and he didn't eat again until 4:00am when Sarah woke up too sore to hold off any longer. She actually had to wake him up to feed him, which is such a change! Between those 7 hours, he only woke up once but he made sure to scream for at least 20 minutes straight. For those of you who have experienced this, you know how incredibly difficult it is to sit through that. By now you are acquainted with your child's cries. You know one another well enough to ease their suffering quickly, and if not right away, then you have quite the bag of tricks to definitely resolve the issue in a matter of 3 minutes. Our nightly trend is relief in seconds; basically just the time it takes for Sarah to get up and to the crib since all he really ever needs is to eat for a few minutes before falling back to sleep. Instead we now lie there both pretending to sleep. For those of you soon to experience this, I'm not out of the woods yet, so I can't tell you it'll all be worth it, though I'm pretty certain it will.
I'll write again soon to give an update on what comes of this. We have read story after story of how parents felt hopeless, thinking their children would never get over the needed night time attention, but in each of these stories it only took 3 or 4 days of agony, and the babes completely changed, sleeping the night away. Tonight is night 4, and we shall see...
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