Sleep

I miss sleep. I am preoccupied with the idea of sleep: when will I sleep through the night again? How can I make my child sleep? Why won't he take a damn nap that last more than 30 minutes? Am I creating bad sleep habit and associations despite my every effort to avoid doing just that? I am giving up social engagements in an attempt to get Theo on a proper sleep schedule but it's hard to get him on a schedule when his sleep is so erratic. My new strategy is to start giving him dream feeds at 10pm in the hopes that he will sleep through the night. I might even make the dream feed a formula feed to fill up his belly more. If I can just get him to stop waking up at 1:30 every night it would be a miracle. Last night I thought, if he's waking at 1:30, that's roughly a six-hour stretch of sleep so maybe if I feed him then, he'll be good for another stretch until 7 or so. Nope. He woke up at 2, I fed him and he was awake again at 5:30ish. Fortunately, he happily stayed in his bed until 6. Right now he is squealing in his bed when he is supposed to be sleeping. He only slept for 30 minutes this morning and was up at 8, so at 11:30 he should be asleep again. If I had a large amount of disposable income I would be at a sleep clinic in a heartbeat.

And since my world revolves around Theo these days, the other piece of news is that we think he has a sensitivity to pears and bananas. The rash on his face is back after having bananas yesterday. I wonder if all the fruit I ate when I was pregnant triggered some kind of fruit allergy in him. We'll wait awhile and reintroduce those fruits in another month or so and see what happens. Once the rash has cleared, we're moving on to sweet potatoes.

Oh yeah, I have a blog

Hi there. It's been awhile. The longer it's been the less inclined I am to post because it feels like there is just more to write. We have been home for over 3 weeks now. England was good. Theo was a pretty good traveler overall. He slept most of the way over because it was a red-eye but only slept an hour on the way home (6.5 hours, ugh). He also did well on the various train rides and car rides while we were there. He broke out in a rash that got worse and worse. Came home to be diagnosed as eczema. I thought it was the detergent we used while in England but he also ate a couple of new foods while we were there. So, all his clothes got re-washed and we scaled back his foods to basically start all over again. I changed my diet, first by drastically scaling back my chocolate intake which had reached absurd heights while in England, Home of Cadbury. I kept slathering him in Aquafor as the pediatrician recommended but that was doing nothing. Then I decided to cut out dairy from my diet and then this week, soy. The change in my diet combined with some much better lotion recommended by the guy at Kids Rx - a specialty pharmacy for kids in the West Village (prompting another "I love this town" moment on my part) - and his skin seems to have made a dramatic improvement. Yesterday I had some milk in a coffee and after his afternoon breast milk he seemed to have some redness around his mouth so I might be on to something. I'll go a few more days dairy-free and then mid-week I want to experiment with yogurt which, interestingly enough, is really the only dairy I'm missing (except on the exceptionally warm days we had last week when I really wanted some ice cream). Rich had a lactose intolerance when he was young (and still kind of does but he ignores it) so it wouldn't be surprising if Theo does too.

In other Theo updates, he now has two teeth. I'll try to snap a picture of them and post it. He is sitting up by himself. He still tips over so I stay close but he's getting stronger and stronger. He rolls around a lot and I can tell he wants to start crawling because he really reaches for things and tries to squirm his way to them. He's babbling a lot more conversationally and he loves, loves, loves, making raspberries with his tongue. I think it tickles or something but it's really pretty damn funny.

Rich and I celebrated our 4-year wedding anniversary last week. Karen babysat and we went out to dinner. Then Thursday night we had a grad student babysit and we went out to dinner with Karen, Ralph and Mike and Jackie who are in town from Boston while Mike attends a class for work. It was so fun to be out with friends without a baby in tow and after doing that two weeks in a row I think I am hooked! The only problem is that it is expensive at $12 an hour which is the average going rate for babysitters in this town (and that's for unskilled labor - those with more experience go for $15 and higher!). It makes going to the movies a nearly $60 evening and that's without popcorn and soda!

We had a week of glorious weather and now the rain has returned. Rainy days go by so much more slowly. The little man is waking from his nap so I must go. Now that I've filled in some gaps I'll try to be better about keeping up to date.