How We're Doing: Chase Edition

How We're Doing:

At almost four months old, here's how we're doing on the Chase front:

Winning:

• Adorableness. 

               Seriously, this chunky, roly-poly baby of mine is SO ADORABLE.  Cole was a beautiful baby, all big brown eyes and long charcoal lashes - but Chase is just cute.  He's a squish of a little man and it's all I can do to not nibble on his fat little wrists and thighs.  He has a way of smiling hugely at someone and then squishing his fists into his face shyly and ducking his head that is just adorable.  I could snuggle and talk to him all day long, especially when he studies my face so intently and coos to me so seriously.

• Eating. 

               Oh my, eating.  I am so eternally grateful for this babe's ability to breastfeed so well.  We have had absolutely zero breastfeeding issues (well, some oversupply on my part, but we got that figured out in no time).  He's efficient, doesn't hurt me, and is pretty much a total star. I love love love it.  Even (mostly) at 3:00 am.

• Entertaining himself. 

                  Chase is awesome at playing on his own.  If he's in a good mood, I can plop him down on the floor, on his playmat, or in his crib and he will happily play there, sucking on his fists and talking, for sometimes as long as an hour.  I'm a firm believer in kids entertaining themselves, so I love being able to start him off right.

Works in progress:

• Sleeping.

             Oh dear.  Sleeping.  Well...it's erratic at best.  One time, he actually slept through the night, which was amazing and miraculous and everything I thought it would be.  But then the next night he was up four times, one of those times for almost three hours of screaming. His naps are either fantastic or nonexistent.  Sometimes it takes him five minutes to get to sleep, sometimes three hours.  Occasionally I can put him down drowsy but awake and he'll drift off, but most of the time he needs to be fast asleep and then still might wake up five minutes after I put him down in his crib.  It's...pretty frustrating.  The hardest part for me is not knowing what to do to help him sleep better.  I've tried everything, I've done everything "right" according to research about how to help him sleep... and yet here we are.  I'm a much better and more patient mom when I'm relatively well rested, so this is Priority One for us.  It's just a matter of figuring out what works - any suggestions?

• Getting out of the house

            Seriously, this is my nemesis.  We...pretty much never leave the house.  It's honestly just too much effort.  My kids have always needed more sleep than the "recommended" amounts, which means Chase is napping five or six times a day, with a bedtime at 6 pm.  Cole has one long nap per day, with a bedtime at 7:30.  Between meals and sleeping times, we sometimes only have an hour long window to get out of the house and back before someone needs to sleep or eat.   This, with a preschooler who can easily take that entire hour to find his shoes and go pee - well, it just means it's too much stress and effort sometimes to make it out.  While this does make it difficult to get groceries (I would pay a million dollars to have someone deliver my groceries to me every week.  WHY is no one getting on this??!), with the nicer weather we are having we are usually quite content to just hang out here and play.

• Getting on a schedule

               I'm totally not a stickler to putting Baby on a schedule.  I don't think it's fair or respectful to force a child into a sleeping/eating/wake routine that might not be what works for him/her.  However, I do love to have a general schedule for naps, just so that I CAN be respectful of when Baby will need a nap, at home, in his own comfy crib.  Right now, we are all over the place.  Some days, Chase takes 4 random, short 45 mins; some days he'll take a couple 30 minute naps with one long 90 minute nap.  I really never ever know when he's going to be tired until he just IS. I've been logging his nap schedule in an effort to find a general idea of when he's going to nap...but its so all over the place I can't find a real pattern.  So eventually we're going to work on getting that situation hammered out.
 
All in all, things are going pretty smoothly and we're all adjusting well to life with a new baby in the house!