If you've noticed that I haven't written a blog post in a while, let me remind you that I have two children now. Two children who are beautiful, wonderful, and an absolute handful!
I recognize that what I'm about to write may not be very interesting in the slightest to anyone who may stumble across it. This is more of a "write it down for my own memory" post. That being said, we are currently working on sleep-training the soon-to-be one-year-old in the Stone home.
We have a two-bedroom home. There are four of us. This causes a slight conundrum in the sleeping arrangement department. Now, before you give me the "when I was growing up" speech, I'm fully aware that much greater numbers of people have lived in far smaller spaces. My own father is one of eight siblings, and they always had multiple children per room in their house. (On that note, I honestly never thought about how that worked with new babies, until I had my own children.) Back to our current circumstance. The complication is this: Owen has yet to sleep completely through the night. He has made drastic improvements (he wakes up once a night at the same time every night now), but still not straight through the night. He either must share a room with us, or share a room with Aubrey (who has just turned three). If he shares a room with us, we have to tip-toe around in the dark when we need to do anything after he has gone to bed. If he shares a room with Aubrey, we run the risk every night of him waking her when he has his middle of the night wake-up. And then we would have two children awake in the middle of the night that we would have to deal with. In either sleeping arrangement, I am also limited in the sleep-training department. By that, I mean that if he were in a room alone, there are steps I would take or techniques I would implement to help teach him how to self-soothe when he wakes up in the night, which would eventually teach him not to wake up at all. The primary "technique," if you can even call it that, is that I would let him cry it out (within reason). I am confident that this would work pretty well for him because this is how we got him to break the habit of waking up TWICE a night, as the first wake-up time was before we had gone to bed. He can't cry it out in Aubrey's room, for obvious reasons. He can't cry it out in our room because not only do I have very limited patience for a crying baby who is only three feet away from me, he also KNOWS that I'm three feet away from him and is totally offended by me not responding to his crying, which makes him cry even more.
Enter: my hair-brained idea that may actually work. Rob and I are spending several nights (hopefully not more than "several") sleeping on an air mattress in the living room! While it is not the world's most comfortable arrangement, I can already say that it is helping to accomplish the sleep-training that so desperately needed to take place. Last night was our first night, as the air mattress was already inflated from the "pajama party" we hosted for the kids' birthdays. Owen had his usual wake-up, but I did not respond. His crying escalated in a matter of minutes to the "I'm REALLY ticked off" screeching cry, but just as soon as it escalated, it dwindled down to nothing. He put himself back to sleep! I was so proud of him! Typically, when he wakes up, he will not go back to sleep until I nurse him. I've tried comforting him in other ways, and he is completely calm, until I lay him back down in his bed. And the attempts I have made to soothe him without picking him up (pat his back, speak softly, etc.) just make him more mad that I'm NOT picking him up. So the fact that he was able to get his frustrations out by crying but then put himself back to sleep was a BIG accomplishment!
Tonight will be our second night. I plan for us to continue until either his wake-ups are very brief and I think that he could self-soothe even with us in the room, or until he isn't waking up at all for several nights in a row. I would take either option.
After the sleeping-through-the-night goal has been accomplished, next on the list is Project "Ditch the Pacifier." He only uses it when sleeping, but it is definitely his comfort item. Aubrey was the same way, and we took hers, cold-turkey, on her first birthday, so if we follow suit with Owen, he's got about two weeks left. Aubrey was sleeping through the night much sooner, though, so I'm not sure if that will delay the pacifier process at all. I'm only willing to tackle one of these issues at a time!
When he is sleeping through the night and can fall asleep without a pacifier, the next step in the process will be for him to officially move into Aubrey's room (yay!) He has slept in there quite a few times before, but I have always rushed in to get him and take him out when he has awoken in the night. Life will be much easier when I don't have to worry about doing that.
On a somewhat related note, I think we have naturally begun the early stages of the weaning process. Now that Owen is eating substantially more food, he has finally started going a bit longer between nursing sessions (he was an every-three-hours baby for a LONG time). This is helpful in preparation for him starting at childcare when I go back to work soon. His timing has worked out so that he pretty much nurses around breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime, and now it looks like we might even be able to merge the dinner and bedtime sessions. This schedule is great because I can continue to nurse him for every one of these times, other than lunch. This being the case, I have started introducing him to almond milk. We have drastically decreased the animal-based foods in our home over the last several months, and, as of Aubrey's third birthday (today), we are no longer purchasing dairy milk for anyone in our home. Originally, I decided to switch Aubrey so that we did not have to keep up with three different kinds of milk when Owen started on whole milk (almond for us, 1% for Aub, whole for Owen). However, the more I thought about it, I decided I might as well have Owen start off on almond milk, as well. I have researched non-dairy milk for babies, and I have come across a wide variety of opinions on the matter. The most compelling argument for dairy milk that I came across was just the simple fact that its fat content is higher than all the others, which for babies is a good thing. But, as Owen will only essentially be having about one cup of milk per day (at lunch) and will continue to be nursed at other times (at least for the foreseeable future), I am not as concerned about fat content. I also plan to incorporate yogurt (the whole-milk, organic, unsweetened stuff) into his diet, along with things like avocados, which he already loves, which have lots of good, healthy fats in them. This should make up for whatever may potentially be "lacking" in his milk consumption, although I'm not completely convinced that it is "lacking" as much as the dairy industry would like for us to believe (I have watched a lot of documentaries... you can read about those in another post).
As for the almond milk itself, I have just recently started to make my own. No, I'm not a crazy "hippie" momma (okay, well maybe I am just a little)... this is actually quite easy! The process goes like this: soak one cup of raw almonds in water over night, or longer. If you have a chance to change out the water during this process, that's even better. Drain and rinse the almonds really well. Throw them in a blender with 4-6 cups of water, depending on your preference in the final outcome. You can also add in vanilla and/or a natural sweetener such as dates, or any other flavors you want to experiment with. After they are well blended (about two minutes in my Ninja blender), strain the whole mixture through a "nut milk bag" or some other really fine straining device. Squeeze the living daylights out of the almond pulp left in the strainer so as to get every available drop! And that's it! Home-made almond milk. It's very delicious and doesn't have the additives of the store-bought stuff. You get about half-a-cup more than the amount of water you added, so for example, I use six cups of water, so I get about 6 1/2 cups of almond milk in the final product. As for the almond pulp that is left over, throw it in a dehydrator or low-temp oven to dry out, and you've got almond meal! It tends to clump together a little, but that doesn't matter when you're tossing it into smoothies or things like that. And I'm sure you could break it up pretty easily, if you needed to.
So that's life at the Stone home. Tune in next time.
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