The Shrieker from the Black Lagoon

I have been so mesmerised by sleep training that I have neglected to update about all the fun things that Wren is doing lately. Firstly, from the title, Wren is shrieking up a storm. He loves to make loud noises and smiles when you copy him and shriek back.

Physically, he is making many new moves. Despite rolling over both ways a week ago he is doing it no more frequently and often has to be coaxed. I would say he is on the way to mastering rolling but really rediscovers it every day when he rolls over and then lies there looking stunned. Hands are something completely different. He has a sense of supreme confidence about his hands. He grabs at anything within reach and is rather too accurate for my comfort. In the past 15 minutes he has grabbed:
1) my hair
2) My glass of water as I drank.
3) the frog on his mobile.
3) The straps on the carrier.
4) his other hand.
5) His toes.

He is very interested in food. Although I swore he wouldn't get to taste food until he was 6 months and day he has already sampled watermelon and banana in tiny tastes. He chomps them seriously and swallows. Once, I gave him a small piece of banana to mash in his hands and he spent a while industriously mashing it up and then tasting it from his fingers. I actually allowed him to wrench the piece off the banana and after that he was very very eager to get the banana back and shouted and cried when it was out of reach.

Now the sleep stuff. Okay, I have never been an advocate of crying-it-out techniques of sleep training except as a last resort. I am having to rethink. My life is 100% better since we started sleep training. I get 3hrs in a row almost every night and even when I dont' I sleep better because the interuptions are shorter, sort-of-planned and happen in the early hours of the morning rather than midnight till 3am when I used to have trouble. The past two nights wren has put himself to sleep without any fussing and I have caught him before he woke to nurse twice. He still gets up too early but that is a much easier problem to cope with.

Tonight, I plan to elimate the 1am nursing so he will go from 10pm till 4am. I anticipate a waking or two while he becomes used to this but he has only been nursing for 5mins or less at 1am so he won't be suddenly starved. If he can learn to sleep 10pm till 4am I will be super excited (even more sooper excited than I am!) The book says he can sleep 11 hours easily without nursing but I am lacking a bit of faith on that count.

Meanwhile, with all my new found alertness I have been catching up with tasks around the house. I have been selling off unwanted things from the basement and have made about $100 in dribs and drabs. Of course I am also buying from Craigslist so I may not have any net gain yet. I am often stunned by the things people buy and sell on Craigslist. Today, I noticed someone offering this choice item: "Dark wood oval coffee table (dog bites on the edges)"

I have also been doing some gardening and preparing for summer by getting water balloons and an inflatable boat. By the time real summer comes around many essential items will be out of stock in our local shops - displaced by the fall merchandise two months early. I cannot fathom this except to say that I must be the most disorganized consumer to be caught by this marketing strategy year after year. Until this year!

Now, Wren has woken from one of his 3 scheduled naps and despite "the book's" theory he seems unwilling to use the last 20 minutes of allotted naptime. I think I will work on naps more vigorously when he is sleeping reliably at night. Now I will go and rescue him from the bedroom.