Sleep at Last

As you know, we have had some adventures with Mathias and his sleeping pattern. After the last breakthrough, we settled into an acceptable pattern of him waking up twice to eat, once right before we went to bed and once more sometime in the 2:00 to 3:00 am time period. Things were looking good, even if I still had to get up at night.

Then he stopped wanting to nurse during the day. Sorry, Bud, but that is not acceptable. Mathias would nurse well at night, and then not nurse much until dinner time. To me, there is nothing worse than wanting to feed my baby and to have him refuse, expressing his desire with wiggles, screams and bites.

Luckily, I spoke to a wise friend at church (the wisdom coming from having six kids) who said that she had had the same problem with some of her kids and that the only way to fix it was to stop nursing them at night. Inspired by her experiences and the hope that there was a solution to the problem (that I would be happy with), we started that night.

A week and a half later, I'm happy to say that Mathias is well on his way to sleeping through the night. I started by just cutting out the second feeding, but the last couple of nights, he has cut out the first one as well. I've been getting so much sleep that I am just exhausted! And even better than that, Mathias has nursed well during the day ever since I started. He doesn't get as distracted as he used to so I don't have to shut myself up in a room and warn Anna to stay away or else.

Hurray for Sleep!