Our little night owl

The very next night after LO started sleeping in his bed again, NB was awake from 11 pm to almost 2am crying.  Ultimately I nursed him and finally got him settled back to sleep.  He had had a runny nose and fever for about 2 days, but they hadn't seem to keep him up until Saturday.  We had never run into that issue with LO.  Whatever sleep issues he's had, they have never been at night.  We've always said we don't go back into our boys' rooms at night for crying unless they are sick.  We are so fortunate that that never came up until 10 days ago.  Sunday night and Monday nights were much the same.  By the wee hours of Tuesday morning I had decided to take NB in to his pediatrician.  We had tried everything we could to console him in those three nights, but ultimately felt we were getting nowhere.  He would sleep a little on our chests, but wasn't comfortable enough to sleep there long, and he just screamed in his crib most of the day and night.  If you've met our NB you know that just isn't him at all!  Sure enough, Dr F said our little guy had his first ear infection.  Maybe it was just me, but one dose of pink medicine and dropperful of ear numbing meds and our little guy seemed much improved.  We started to get some sleep again the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and we've been back in our routine ever since.

That experience helped me realize several things.  Primarily it was clear that, while NB still may not be sleeping through the night, he definitely isn't screaming through it either.  He may wake and coo and play for awhile and go back to sleep, but we really would know it if he was screaming the whole time.  I also found that, while I was willing to nurse NB in the night to comfort him, he only accepted that offer once.  The other times he wasn't interested.  He definitely is not waking to eat.  Lastly, as sweet as it was (though heart-wrenching since he was sick) to hold my baby again and rock him for comfort...it was also not the best place for him to sleep and we were easily "zombified" by our return to his newborn-like nights.  Nope, it's good those nights are over.

In recent days it has become clear that our little guy might be doing his best work at night.  Perhaps he is waking and perfecting new skills.  I haven't mentioned this before, but at seven and a half months, I still have barely seen NB roll from his stomach to his back.  By "barely" I mean I once caught him doing a full back-tummy-back roll form the corner of my eye.  Once. I know he can do it because he sometimes is awake on his back in the mornings, but he rolls to sleep on his tummy right away when I lay him down.  During the day though, if he finds himself on his tummy for long, he just cries until someone gets him or flips him over.  In addition, for the last month or two, we've seen that he could scoot himself from one end of his crib to the other.  I suspected he was just getting his toes under him and pushing forward some.  He didn't really do it anywhere else, but he always ends up at the opposite end of his crib from where we lay him.  So we have seen the end results of these skills, but not the processes involved to create those results.  We've also found he could turn his mobile on form time to time.  At first I thought he accidentally hit the box with his head, but, last month, I saw him with his hand on the buttons and the mobile turning.

This past week has really taken the cake though.  Just five days ago (the Saturday after Thanksgiving) when all of our family had left from their visits, DH walked into NB's room in the morning to find him like this:

 

It took him a second to realize what was different.  Apparently our NB has learned to push himself up into a seated position.  He's done it a few times in his crib now, but not yet done it in front of us.  Just two nights ago, he finally unveiled his crib mobility moves.  Yes, we now have a commando crawler in the house!  In fact, he sometimes is getting himself up on his knees and crawling once or twice before he's back to his belly.  No doubt he'll be up in the night perfecting the all-fours moves for the next couple of weeks. This is a real game-changer for us and especially for LO.  NB is most motivated to move by LO's favorite toys, his new garbage truck and the pom-pom "trash" that goes in it.  Not only do we now have to be careful to keep things from NB's mouth, but the sibling dynamics will shift as NB can now actually get to what he wants and LO thinks everything should be his.  Good times!  The only thing that will push LO's buttons more than NB getting "his" toys will be NB getting "his" food.  Of course we really think NB is working on getting some teeth now too, so his diet will progress before too long.  Our little night owl has been busy!