No, you're never gonna get it

I feel like we're back to the beginning, where I'm writing about the minutiae of J's sleep habits, the obsession of my life. Not the most scintillating of topics, I'll grant you, but never have I been so concerned with solving a problem, untangling a maze, or unlocking a riddle. Sleep, you see, my sleep, is very important to me (I am my mother's child) and so J's sleep is doubly concerning, for his sake as well as for mine.

Last night was the second night of our next big sleep experiment, only this time we were accompanied by the teddy bear (you see how desperate I am, throwing SIDS cautions to the wind and letting, no encouraging him sleep with a stuffed animal). He went to bed as usual at 6:30-ish and though we tried very, very hard to wake him from the total stupor he fell into after his bottle, we were unsuccessful. He was just a limp little blob of a boy who was very fast asleep, so we put him down. I was confident, however, that he would wake up in a half hour or so and want the rest of his bottle, which he did, like clockwork. Unexpectedly, however, he also woke up an our after that and had a little more to eat, which was surprising and brought his evening total to 8 ounces, a new record for him. Thankfully, though, after this interruption, he went to sleep for good.

And he stayed that way, until 12:30, at which point I actually had to wake him up to feed him. You see, our goal is to get him to sleep until 6:30 or so, and he can only go about 6 hours without eating right now, so if he eats just after midnight, in theory he can then last 'til morning. So he ate while still asleep (a dream feeding, they call it), and went right back to bed. Then, at 3:30am, I woke up to the sounds of him playing with the teddy bear (the video monitor confirmed this). So I let him go on playing, until suddenly he started crying. But he wasn't hungry, he was just wide awake. Shoot! So I put him back down, thinking this won't last long, given his much wakefulness, and it turned out he was awake because of some stomach issues, which he then resolved (use your imaginations), and after that he did in fact go back to sleep after I rocked him a bit.

And then, this morning, I woke up at 6:30 to more sounds of him playing quietly in his bed, something he has never, ever done. Once again, the teddy bear seemed to be amusing and/or calming him for quite awhile, until he got hungry and gave some perfunctory cries to let us know he was awake. So I'm going to consider last night mostly a success. He hardly at anything after his late night feeding, he put himself to sleep a couple of times, and he got up at a decent hour in the morning. What a difference not seeing the sunrise makes, people!