Improvement

I never did get back on here and post about Robert's sleep progress. We've had a couple of rough nights, but I feel like he's improving. I've really tried to be diligent about getting him back in his crib during the night. I do great when he only wakes once or twice. I give in when it's 3 a.m. and I'm back in there for the fourth time. Or when it's 5:30 a.m. and I know he won't sleep much longer after he goes down anyway. For some reason he's been waking only an hour or two after I put him down for the night. He was also consistently waking every 2.5 hours or so for a couple of weeks. The last few nights have been much better though. He slept from 8-7 last night and only woke once. Yay Robert!

Naps seem to have improved also. I decided to start weaning him this week. I'm going to take it really slow and plan on cutting him off completely at a year. The mid-morning nursing session has been the first to go. Yesterday for the first time, he fell asleep and went down for a nap with a bottle. Yay Robert! He slept for 1.5 hours too! I think that's some kind of morning nap personal record. He's taken a bottle just fine for a while now but just would not go down without at least a few minutes of comfort nursing so this was a big step. He did it again today and has been asleep for over an hour now.

Last week he fell asleep while bouncing in his jumperoo. I picked him up and took him to his room knowing that I would have to nurse him back to sleep. He did wake up while I was carrying him upstairs, but I decided to try to put him in his crib awake and see what would happen. He fussed a little, but just a minute or so of patting him on his back and he went to sleep. I could not believe it. He's also woken up crying just a little and has gone back to sleep on his own a couple of times and it's getting easier to get him back to sleep by patting him on the back if he wakes up too much when I lay him down. It doesn't work every time, but I'll take anything I can get.

I'm really hoping this isn't just a fluke. I've thought that he would improve as he got older just like Clara did, but he wasn't doing it as quickly as she did so my frustration just kept mounting. Hopefully now that he's eating more food and getting formula he'll just keep getting better and better.