hazydaysinbelleville

[hazydaysinbelleville]

Trying to do it better the second time around

There’s so much that I feel we got right the first time. We loved our Yoyo stroller from Babyzen. Really I can’t think of a single downside to it. It’s wonderfully good quality, super durable, ultra-lightweight, easy to use and super portable. Max calls it the Apple, to the PCs of other stroller brands. At one point I tried out a Bugaboo just to see, and there’s no comparison. The Yoyo is superior as soon as you try adjusting any moving part. The Bugaboo is downright clunky in comparison (and we know what people pay for it). I also loved our fold-up baby bath from Stokke, and most of all the Ergo Baby Carrier! That was really the gift that kept on giving: I used it basically until C was two years old, carrying him on my back as easily as I did on my front, and always comfortably. I also loved the Wubbanub pacifier that Andrea and Henry gave us. It did turn into a dependency, but I think it was important and ultimately worth the addiction (that was broken quite easily in the end). 

But there are some things that I remember as irritants in the early days, and I’ve set out to avoid them this time. The biggest is that we didn’t do well with our maternity hospital -- we didn’t know the system well, and ended up without any choice, and I hated the one where I gave birth, for a whole bunch of reasons both big and small. So really the most important thing I’ve changed this time is in having selected a hospital very consciously. 

But now on to more frivolous considerations. 

1. Backpack diaper bag. Last time we only had a big tote as a diaper bag. Rough on the shoulder, irritating to carry around while also juggling baby, not well organized. This time I’m going for the convenience of a backpack. Sticking with an androgynous color and style so that it’s comfortable for whichever parent happens to be taking baby out. 

2. Car seat. We don’t own a car, so last time around, we didn’t buy a car seat, which seemed logical enough. But we had to bring our baby home from the hospital on the metro, because it seemed too dangerous to carry him on our laps in a cab, and in the end that felt a little too germy and grungy. After that, there were many instances when we wanted to take a cab but hesitated because of car seat complexities. This time, I found a very good price on a used car seat (the Nuna Pipa), and my mom generously offered to pay for it.

3. A bouncy chair that actually bounces. The one we had before was something I chose blindly, basically because I liked the print on the fabric, but it turned out to be cheap-feeling, and, more damningly, it had no motion to it, which meant no bouncing for baby Casimir. This time I got the Babybjorn, which babies can quickly learn to power on their own for a nice self-bouncing session (or you can bounce it for them).

4. Nursing bras that make me feel supported and put-together and pretty. My mom got me some super comfortable ones last time, and they were truly the most well reviewed maternity bras on the market, but I guess everyone has their own taste -- for me, they sort of gave me this drooping mono-boob and made me feel much less put-together and sharp in my clothes than the way I usually like to feel. This time I really researched my options, and got myself these two: 

5. Yes to medicine. I’d also just like to say that last time, when there were issues with constipation in the weeks after the birth, I thought I could handle it myself by eating a lot of dry fruit. This time I will definitely take any medicines that anyone is willing to prescribe me. That was completely nuts.

[hazydaysinbelleville]

The pregnancy where I wore the same thing every day. 

This is a totally different day, but you’d never know it. 

I found two very long and voluminous wool sweaters that come down over my bump without emphasizing it -- one is the sweater shown, an Italian-made sweater with this interesting pattern of houses and windows and roofs, and the other one is an enormously long, roomy navy cardigan from Brittany, where they know how to treat wool to give it a sort of sheen, and make these fisherman’s sweaters that never pill.  I alternate between the two. 

I wear the same jeans every day -- kind of gross -- should have bought another pair when I had the chance -- pregnancy jeans with the big elastic panel at the top. 

The kindest thing I ever did for myself was to buy these loafers that you can step into. Not even a finger needed to ease on the heel as you do with some loafers, which means I don’t have to bend over at all, and it’s marvelous. 

[hazydaysinbelleville]

In his bassinet

This is how I found him today -- he’d awoken from his nap but wasn’t crying. 

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Sweet times in Portugal

Casimir attends his first picnic...

Goes to cafés: 

And takes in the view...

Casimir was basically unimpressed though. 

“Now tell me, where again is this panoramic view you speak so highly of?”

[hazydaysinbelleville]

Casimir’s first voyage: Porto

We’re in Porto! The trip is to celebrate Max’s birthday on the 13th, and to show Casimir the city where Max and I fell in love. 

I was also thinking it would be a kind of test-run before attempting the big trip to Boston and New York. Max and I have both been pretty nervous about flying and being abroad with a little baby. 

In the event, flying with Casimir was not just fine: it was wonderful. As the plane began taxiing down the runway, Casimir felt the movement and looked me in the eye with curiosity. As the wheels lost touch with the ground he held my gaze, and as the force of the lift-off pushed him tighter into my chest, a smile spread across his face and he gave a great belly laugh, the second of his life so far, still looking into my eyes -- in surprise and delight and wonder. You can imagine the emotional intensity! I don't think he necessarily knew he was flying, but still, he seemed completely alert, astonished, delighted, and impressed. We had been so worried that the pressure change would make him cry, cause pain, etc, but instead he laughed!

So the flight, the travel, was nowhere near as difficult as we had thought it would be. The boy never even cried. The first night, however, I was jumpy and on edge, nervous to have the baby in the new environment. I kept worrying that he was cold, and every 10 minutes developed a paranoia that he had stopped breathing in the unfamiliar baby bed, and so of course I didn’t sleep well, nor did Max. As a result, yesterday Max and I were both so tired, and Casimir so out of sorts (where was our easy baby?) that by the end of the day I was wondering why in the world anyone would ever take a trip with a young baby, and thinking we had basically ruined his carefully established routine. 

But last night I slept well, and today he’s back on track. I have the impression Casimir doesn’t remember ever having been anywhere else. He’s been laughing and smiling all day, and is making a lot of progress in his project of learning how to roll over. He seems to love the light in our apartment here. 

We had an amazing lunch on a restaurant terrace overlooking the Rio Douro. 

Casimir was in his stroller beside me at the table, kicking his legs and enjoying the beautiful light, while I ate olives.

[hazydaysinbelleville]

Pictures!

With Mio!!

[hazydaysinbelleville]

On baby-wearing

Baby-wearing look: polka-dot cotton housedress with buttons down the front for easy breastfeeding; double-breasted tweed coat with enough fabric to encompass baby; red suede loafers, made in France; Chilean fabric made into the baby-wrap that is holding Casimir; Casimir’s orange and black hat knit for him by his Grandma Tamara in Sweden. 

Some notes on my look here: I have a white swaddle blanket around my neck as a kind of scarf. If you look carefully at the second photo, you can see there is a pacifier tied onto one corner. This is in case Casimir feels like a nap, for quick access. The Sorbonne tote bag on my shoulder is our only diaper bag at the moment. It can be hooked easily around the stroller handlebar and it’s gender neutral, and while those are real advantages, inside it’s chaos. I’m thinking of getting something more organized. Also notice the large bottle of water in my hand -- breastfeeding makes you constantly thirsty. 

About baby-wearing: 

It’s extremely cozy to go around with your baby on your chest. For any given trip to the grocery, if I have to choose between having Casimir on my chest, having him in the stroller, or leaving him at home with his papa, my enthusiasm will always be for the first option. It’s extremely calming and purely pleasurable to have one’s baby snuggled so close while out in the world. It removes all the stress of wondering how he is doing elsewhere, while also giving a feeling of freedom and autonomy and ease of movement. 

Casimir also seems to prefer it, for the most part. When he’s in a carrier on my chest he looks around at the world, and always goes into an extremely alert, quiet mood, as though he felt the burden of responsibility. And he almost never cries.

That said, there are downsides. When it’s warm out, it can be very hot. It can be rough on the back. It’s heavy. Casimir can’t get any exercise while he’s in one -- he can’t kick his legs around the way he likes. For these reasons, I would never want to eliminate the stroller entirely, and any time we’re going out for a long time and I think Casimir will take a real nap, I like to have the stroller so he can lie flat and sleep a long time. If we’re going to a restaurant, I like to have the stroller so he can sleep on his own while we eat. Or if I’m going shopping for clothing, obviously it’s nice for him to be somewhere safe while I try things on. 

There are about a million different types of baby-wearing devices currently on the market, meeting virtually every thinkable taste and requirement. We now have three, and I’d say all three are worth having. There are pros and cons to each. 

1. The wrap

The simplest is the one you see above: a baby wrap composed of one long piece of fabric, at least 4 meters long. Many baby-gear companies have tried to market their own long strip of fabric as though it were something special, and while it’s true that the degree of stretchiness of the fabric and the fabric’s general quality make a difference, for people like me who love textiles it’s worthwhile to just find a great piece of fabric. I bought my piece from a Chilean woman living in Paris who had it made in Chile. But it was only 3.2 meters long, and therefore impossible to tie the knots I had in mind, so I extended it using some navy blue grosgrain ribbons I bought in San Remo. I’ve been delighted with the results: since the part tied behind my back is just thin ribbons, it’s less heavy altogether as an object, and less bulky when leaning back in a chair against the knots. Meanwhile, the fabric is a wonder. 

Pros: 

-- First and foremost: breastfeeding. The wrap can be tied in a great variety of ways, including as a sling, and baby can lie in all sorts of positions, making discrete, on-the-go breastfeeding extremely simple. The wrap itself acts as a screen.

Would you guess that Casimir is eating in this photo? No? Nor did anyone else at the supermarket. With the wrap, you can take out your breast and latch baby on invisibly, all while maintaining a brisk stride (I took this photo several weeks ago when Casimir was still eating nearly constantly and extremely unpredictably -- nowadays I probably wouldn’t feed him at the supermarket...)

-- Style. If you have a piece of fabric you respect, the wrap is least likely to disturb the tone of a great look. While this might seem like sheer vanity, the early weeks and months of motherhood are hard enough without the abnegation of such small pleasures. 

Cons: 

-- In the summer, the wrap is very hot (en revanche, very nice now that’s it’s cold out.)

-- It’s not fantastic on the back -- you can develop some backache. 

-- If you’ve gone to visit people and have taken the baby out to pass him around, and you feel like removing the wrap from your body because it’s hot or ungainly, it’s inconvenient to re-tie the wrap -- hard to get the ideal amount of tension if you’re not concentrating on it. 

In summary, i recommend the wrap for longer outings in public, say, for going to a restaurant or going to a museum, where you foresee a possible need to breastfeed your baby but are unsure how much privacy and comfort you’ll have. The wrap gives me a great feeling of being insured against every possibility.

2. The Baby Björn Original Carrier

My mom made us a gift of the Baby Björn original carrier before Casimir was born and we’ve really enjoyed it. It has all the advantages of simplicity. 

-- Very easy to put on and take off -- much easier than the wrap. 

-- Very easy to put the baby in and get the baby out. Getting baby out does not require taking the thing off yourself. It has these ingenious clasps that allow you to get him out without even waking him up, if he falls asleep. 

-- Lightweight. 

-- Baby can face out at the world. 

Cons: 

-- VERY rough on the back. All the weight is up high between the shoulder blades; there is no waist belt at all. This leads to pretty severe back pain if you go out and walk a long distance in it. 

I recommend the Baby Björn for when you are going to visit people at home, and foresee having the baby passed around a great deal, and don’t want things to be complicated upon arrival and departure. 

3. The ergo

I realized how convenient the BabyBjörn was, and I really loved it, but I wished it wouldn’t give me back pain. So I decided to invest in an Ergo.

Advantages here are the comfort, and fantastic way of distributing weight. 

Pros: 

-- By far the best option for long distances, as all of baby’s weight goes into the hips, as it should with any good-quality hiking backpack. With the ergo, you basically don’t feel the baby’s weight at all. This alone makes it something you should have, all other bells and whistles aside.

-- Rain/sun protection. There is an awesome little hood that tucks into the front pocket of the ergo, and you can pull it up over the baby’s head to act as both a rain and sun shield. 

-- Cool front zipper pocket that is large enough for your wallet, keys, etc. so that you don’t need to carry any purse. 

-- Personally I think the army-surplus look of the original ergo is the only honest way of coming to terms with the reality of sporting a baby carrier. A lot of the thousands of newer baby carrier companies try to gloss the thing over by using prints and patterns that make you look like you decorated yourself with a set of placemats from Crate & Barrel. (I’m looking at you, Tula Carrier). 

Cons:

-- Compared to the Baby Björn, both harder to put on and take off, and also harder to get the baby in and out. Basically, you need to take the thing off your shoulders in order to get the baby out, and if you put the thing on before putting on a cardigan and jacket, it’s kind of a pain to have to take off all your clothes to get the baby out. It does have buckles that you can undo, but it’s not nearly as simple as the Baby Björn.

-- I’m not such a fan of the big puffy shoulder straps. I know in theory they’re more comfortable, but they look terrible, and they don’t offer that much of an advantage since the weight is in your hips anyway. 

-- For babies as small as Casimir, you need an “infant insert”. While this insert thing is cute and works well, it’s a pain to have to keep track of two items. Like if I go out with the stroller and the ergo, and at some point I want to transfer the baby from the ergo into the stroller, imagine me: I’ve got the baby, I’ve got the diaper bag, I’ve got the swaddle blanket, I’ve got the infant insert, I’ve got the ergo itself -- I end up feeling like a juggler. A stressed, sweaty juggler, trying not to drop anything onto the sticky sidewalk. 

In summary, I recommend the ergo for when you’re going out on a long walk with the baby that you foresee being physically demanding. With the ergo you’ll feel comfortable the entire time, and manage more than you would with any other carrier. But it should be the kind of outing where you don’t foresee transferring the baby in and out a lot. 

Here I am walking home from a very comfortable trip to a flea market on Sunday with Casimir in the ergo: 

[hazydaysinbelleville]

First laugh

I think I’ll always remember the 5th of November (coincidentally Guy Fawkes night) because it was the evening when Casimir gave his first laugh. It was a hearty belly laugh, but also a little like a choking sound, both at once. Max and I had been watching t.v. while I breastfed, and Casimir had decided he was finished, popped off the breast, and was lying on his back on the Boppy pillow, kicking his legs and staring up at me with a look of great expectation and shared secrets, trying to catch my eye. 

So we paused the show to talk to him. He somehow found this so delightful he began smiling ever more broadly and vocalizing loudly, and Max and I started to laugh, because his sounds are so conversational. I lifted his hand to my mouth and started kissing his little fist, and somehow this pushed him over the edge. Still gazing into my eyes for some kind of confirmation, listening to me and Max laughing, he began his little laugh--a low, bleating, strangulated sound of pure pleasure, coming at a slow tack. This amazing sound made me and Max laugh so hard, with such total happiness, that we both ended up wiping tears from our eyes (and probably disconcerting poor Casimir, who ended up looking confused). 

I’ve been thinking about the great gap between being a parent and being the child of a parent -- how irreconcilable the two perspectives are. I don’t see how this first laughter will ever appear as anything but a banality to Casimir when he is older and looking back on this blog post. To him (as to all sons and daughters, hearing such stories from their parents), the response will be: “But of course I laughed. What did you expect?” Whereas for me it is and will remain one of the greatest and most extraordinary events of my life, not belonging to the realm of the ordinary at all. I mean -- people know parents feel this way. It’s a cliché of parenting sentimentality. I accept this, but I’ve been wondering where the failure to communicate originates. 

I think the source is the great difference in perceived levels of contingency. To any person, imagining yourself never having existed is an empty exercise. You can’t think about never having existed (or at least, you can’t give the thought much time), because all your thinking about anything at all takes your own existence as the initial condition. Whereas Max and I are conscious every day of how contingent Casimir’s life is. We effectively invented this boy out of nothing. One feels how precarious his life is, by extension how precarious all life is: how easily it might have been decided against, or randomly evaporated a few weeks into the pregnancy, or how, today, he is built from nothing but my rather imperfect body. Then, to see this invention of ours come to life, come into an independent personhood that laughs at its own discretion, by its own logic--in a sense, its incredibly bizarre! And yet at the same time, in that there’s a repetition of the same bizarrerie 7 billion times across the globe, it’s commonplace. 

Both perspectives are rational and correct: both the miracle and the call to look beyond the miracle, to overlook the miracle, to treat it as nothing. 

[hazydaysinbelleville]

Welcome to Casimir’s dance party

Casimir is not above a little dance party now and again. Particularly when for some reason he cannot be fed as promptly as he would like to be fed, a dance party passes the time peacefully. He usually prefers to dance whilst tied to mama in a BabyBjörn.

Here are his favorite songs, if anyone wants to recreate his dance party in the privacy of their own home. 

You Wanna Be Americano, Sophia Loren

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJKXMRii668

Rum and Coca-Cola, The Andrews Sisters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiayZdPESno

Sway, Rita Hayworth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5FtCIoJATM

Papa Loves Mambo, Perry Como

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujB-BZn3C4g

Mambo Italiano, Dean Martin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAQQ1Vlk1nE

And in case anyone thinks he only likes mambo, also a twist!

Guarda come dondolo, Edoardo Vianello

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70lUDHsiK7U

[hazydaysinbelleville]

Casimir becomes an American

Casimir will have both American and Swedish citizenship, but both require a lot of paper work. Yesterday we went over to the American Embassy at Place de la Concorde and put in his application for a passport and social security number. We had to give up our cell phones at the door (very heavy security) and Teddy was not allowed in with us. So all I have is this picture of us in the Tuileries Gardens afterwards. Casimir slept through most of the proceedings. 

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First family photos

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Mini-milestone: legs!

For the first time today, Casimir held his own weight with his legs. I had him grasped under his armpits, and as I lowered his feet to the ground, instead of collapsing down as I sank him, he straightened up his legs and pushed off from the earth somewhat mightily. Pretty good! (Unfortunately I did not get a photo...) 

We also tried (and basically failed) to get a good passport photo. Tomorrow morning Casimir will get his first passport -- the American one -- IF any of the pictures we had taken in the photo automat at Monoprix will be allowed. 

[hazydaysinbelleville]

6-week postnatal appointment

It would be easy to only post about good things on this blog, but I’m trying to create some kind of an honest record. 

So here goes. I had my six-week postpartum appointment yesterday, and it was depressing in a number of ways. Firstly, the enormous episiotomy (very long incision) that was performed during Casimir’s birth -- painfully, against my will, and pretty needlessly as a kind of a preemptive measure -- is not healing well. Which I had suspected. Six weeks on, still bleeding, hurting, and the doctor confirmed it was done pretty messily. I will not hide that I feel what was done to me was a gross violation, an act of aggression. I’m angry, and I will continue to be. And it will probably require some time for me to figure out how to work everything out, both physically and emotionally --  the incision itself might need work, and my head certainly does. 

I had a type of fear and sense of nightmare at the doctor’s office that I’ve never had with a doctor in the past. It’s going to take a long time before I’ll feel comfortable in a medical office again. I’m realizing that, at the very least, I’ll need to be a little more careful in the future than I was yesterday -- i’ll need to have a conversation with the doctor and explain what I’ve been through, so as to receive gentler care. I guess? I don’t know really precisely how to approach it. 

In any case, I really hope to face this head on, so as not to sink into neuroses that might affect Casimir!

And last but not least -- I got proof I still have 20 lbs to lose, and up until this appointment, I hadn’t thought about my weight or worried about my weight at all. Such a downer!

[hazydaysinbelleville]

Rapid development

My brother Teddy is here! And not only that, my uncle and aunt Frank and Liz are here! Yesterday we had a great day hanging out all together en famille, lounging in the swanky pad in an ancient hôtel particulier in the Marais that F and L are renting as part of their 35th anniversary celebration. 

Casimir smiled at his new friends almost right away (eagerer to smile at new friends than he is to smile at his mother! Jealous!) and they also got to hear some of his first coos. These have just started in the past days, and certainly don’t come all the time. They even managed to get a recording, which I am so happy about. 

I know it’s a cliché of parenting, but I’ll still say it: I’m amazed at how quickly everything is going. Especially in my sleep-deprived state, it makes my head spin a little to try to keep up with it, conceptually speaking -- how quickly Casimir is changing. You think you have a tiny newborn in your hands but all at once you look down and realize that that tiny newborn has been replaced with a bigger child. It takes real flexibility of mind to stay abreast. 

On the way home I had one of those moments of joy that are difficult to explain: For the first time I put Casimir into the baby-wrap sitting upright instead of lying prone -- see picture above. He seemed excited by this, and went into a mode of quiet, calm tension, immediately holding his chin up and his neck erect, and peering out at the world with an expression so intensely alert, so interested in everything around him, and so serious. He held himself up like that the entire way home, at least a 15-minute walk. At a certain point I saw how tired he was, and tried to encourage him to rest his head against my chest and sleep, but there’s no other way to say it -- he was absolutely determined to keep his chin up and look out at things, fighting off sleep. And then I realized it was the first time he had seen the world -- I’ve always taken him out lying flat on his back or prone in the wrap with no view of things around him. And he pretty much behaved as if it were his first view of the world -- that was the amazing part. 

To feel a person beginning to emerge out of the baby -- what an enormous joy it is.  I think you can see from the picture above how psyched I was.

Finally: Casimir in the arms of his sweet uncle Teddy, also known as дядя федя!

[hazydaysinbelleville]

Destined to forget

Nights have gotten a little better, but my sleep is still so broken that I’m not really putting down new memories. I think it works like this: because the nights are so fragmented, any given day does not feel fully partitioned off from the day that preceded it. It all feels like one long day, or one long night. And in my memory, this implies that I’m losing a sense of a timeline: I can’t really fix things in a sequence. For example, I met up with my friend Marie last Monday (who also just had a baby in August). The Thursday afterwards I wrote to her and said: “It was so nice to see you yesterday!” And the thing is, I really did feel it as yesterday. It wasn’t just a slip. I feel nearly everything in the recent past as “yesterday” -- nothing is any more nor any less distant. It reminds me of the saying: “All points in time are equidistant from eternity”. One might paraphrase it here: “All points in time are equidistant from the mother of a nursling babe.”

The worst part of this brain situation is that I notice already now how much of this sweet period of time I’m forgetting. I think back to the days in the hospital, for example, and don’t remember anymore how I went about feeding Casimir practically, don’t remember precisely how I felt about him, even though I know it was different than it is now. It all seems very hazy. This is the main reason I’m keeping this blog, and always has been. (The choice of title was not random!) I sense that one day the blog will be all that I have left if I want to remember things about this time that are more than stories that became favorite repeated anecdotes. But this puts a lot of pressure to decide which topics to write about here. What will I later most regret having forgotten? 

The following are things I want to record, but haven’t found the time to get to them: 

- How I look at faces of adults on the streets of Paris and see traces of Casimir’s face and wonder if that is what he’ll look like when he grows up. It’s like there are little bits of him everywhere.

- What a wonderful and loving father Max has become, and how many new things I’ve noticed about him, new reasons to love and admire him since Casimir’s birth. It’s so surprising. I knew he’d be great, but I did not know how great. It’s an unexpected blessing. 

- Just all the details of our trial and error with sleep -- all the millions of different little things we’ve tried and discarded. 

- Looking back on my pregnancy -- what I did that I’m glad of, what I did that I regret. 

- The fledgling signs of Casimir’s emerging personality -- things I think might become his character, although perhaps not. 

- The strange unaccustomed feeling of the three of us being a “family”. (I hadn’t previously felt that Max and I constituted a family per se.)

Sometimes I’m surprised at the degree to which I value records of daily life in particular -- all the boring little details, rather than broad abstract musings such as these I’m writing now. But where to find the time to write, and write close to the ground? 

[hazydaysinbelleville]

Latest pictures

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Minuscule victories

At last I figured out how to cut the baby’s fingernails! They had been like angry little claws, and we had tried everything -- biting them off, cutting them off with special baby nail clippers, and filing them off (at the suggestion of the “puéricultrice”.) We couldn’t get anything to work -- his fingers are just so tiny and hard to manoeuvre, and his nails even tinier. Trying to isolate the nail from the finger well enough to cut it without also cutting the finger just wasn’t working, and using a nail file was too fiddly -- you’d be sawing away at it and then stop to examine it, and it would still be claw-like. 

But this morning I figured out a method and it was easy-peasy. I used a big giant adult set of clippers. It would be tricky to explain why it works, but somehow I can slip it underneath the nail very easily. So that’s lovely! Now he doesn’t have to wear gloves!

Second minor victory: last night I got him to go from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. without feeding. He didn’t sleep through, but although he was awake, he also didn’t seem to mind not feeding. What was my method? Singing him his favorite song: “The Wheels on the Bus”. (I even discovered that i could stay in my bed with my eyes closed whilst singing, and he will listen and quiet down in his own bed some feet away.) I think it’s the first step toward getting him to stay asleep during those hours. We count our blessings.