Life at 3 months

Is, in short, way better than life at two months. But things are far from settled. I think the grandest lessons of early parenthood involve an acknowledgment that control and predictability are overrated. Especially when it comes to sleep. Oh god. I have never been so totally obsessed with something over such a long duration. Both Jupiter's and mine. And I think we're finally getting to the point (some time soon) when sleep will become slightly more regular. Which is good, because I was so chronically overtired that I was having trouble thinking of words and going to sleep at night. I was wired, fried like a little kid at the end of a long day. But Jay and I decided to take some small, age-appropriate measures to increase Jupe's night sleep stretches and we think they're yielding results.

One of the most difficult things we've dealt with lately is an awareness that we are not the attachment parents we thought we were. The feeding on demand, the absolutely no-cry sleep policy, the emphasis on baby-wearing...we do some of these things some of the time, but we've come to terms that so much ideology is exactly that: so much ideology. Finding your own path as a new parent can be a tremendous battle of wills: yours and your child's, yours and your spouse's, your own sense of practicality and your own needs versus the ideologies that you think you'd like to maintain when deciding how to parent.

First we moved Jupe to a crib at the age of one month. Then I stopped wearing him in a sling for his naps. And now I have stopped feeding on demand during the day and at night. Which is not to say Jupe is not getting enough to eat - it's easy for him to go two hours between daytime feedings and three hours at night. He eats more at each feeding and we finally (I hope hope hope) broke the pattern of night feedings every two hours. We also started allowing him to fuss/cry for up to five minutes at night, and less than that if he appears distressed. Since starting to do these two things, he has started sleeping from 7-1 or 7-2 in a single stretch each night (the second half of the night is still erratic). Now, there's no guarantee that this will hold, but it has been such a great change for my sleep. But here's the thing: I don't think Jupiter would have been ready for these changes until right about now. Parenting is not only a challenge for parents who want to figure things out, to have predictability - it's also a tremendous waiting game. Babies develop at fairly predictable rates for the first few months and some times it's just a matter of waiting: for the naps to consolidate, for the sleep to lengthen at night, for self-soothing behaviors to develop. And all of this because we decided to follow our gut rather than Dr. Sears.

We also picked up Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. It's a terrible title and poorly written, but the basic tenets are practical and based on sleep science rather than ideology. We're not Weissbluth devotes by any stretch, but the book gave us the confidence that what we felt was right would not 1) hurt our child and 2) lead to bad habits.

Other than sleep, Jupiter is more and more fun every single day. He is starting to laugh, and can grab things and put them in his mouth. But right now he's starting to fuss so I have to sign off. And so it goes...