The Fine Game of Nil

So, Liam is 6 months old today. I can’t believe it. The time really has flown by. Here are some pictures from his first few days and from the last few days, to compare how much he has changed in 6 months.

Bath then:

Bath now:

get in my mouth, rubber ducky!

Towel dry then:

Towel dry now:

Some cute close ups:

1 month old:

6 months:

5 weeks old:

6 months old:

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Practicing our monster roars while wearing our new black monster t-shirt, fuzzy monster pants, and pink bunny rattle socks (but really, who’s gonna hassle a monster about his socks).

This week we started the boy on solid foods. And while the picture above might be a slight misrepresentation, we did get an exciting amount of rice cereal coating both the interior and exterior of the child.

We’re on a 4 to 1 mix of milk to rice cereal, which can hardly be called solid, but it’s still eating from a spoon and a big step for his parents. Mom and I had to have a heated 10 minute discussion in the baby aisle in Shaws over whether to get him the whole grain brown rice cereal or the whole grain white rice cereal and organic or non-GEI.

Now that we’ve finally got some in him, we’re just waiting for the stinky-poop fairy to arrive.

This Christmas, Liam got a 16 oz. Estwing claw hammer from his grandfather Bruce. Estwing is, of course, the Cadillac of striking implements. There are flashier ones of course, the Mustangs and the Porsches with names like the TiBone or DeathStick. But for a pure out-and-out lifetime of quality driving nails there’s Estwing. Right now I have three sitting in my tool drawer. There’s a 10 oz. one that Bruce gave to me when I was about three. A 20 oz. one that I gave to Emily when we were dating in college, and the 18 oz. one that I bought myself when I got jealous of hers. Bruce, of course, has at least two, though probably more like 12, as they all look alike; the whole hammer aged a uniform matte black and the vinyl grip polished smooth. I expect someday to inherit his collection, and then to be faced with the prospect of finally owning too many hammers. What do you do with too many of an object that, when used correctly, has a near infinite lifespan, but that has no value to sell and is too sentimental to give away?

Alex and I are both home sick today. I might have been feeling well enough to go in today, but it would have been really rough… also, Alex can’t really work on getting better if he has to stay home and take care of Liam all day. Right now we are alternating who is playing with Liam and who gets to sleep. It sounds like whatever we have is going around, at least at Alex’s work, hopefully he’ll be better tomorrow so Liam can go to daycare and I can go to work. I figured now is as good a time as any to post Christmas pictures.

Liam and Mommy in front of the tree

Liam seems less than interested in actually opening presents

He liked his Christmas tree/box toy, though

Maus got into the Christmas spirit as well

A cute outfit from Great Aunt Linda and Uncle Bill

Liam realizes with Daddy’s new bike, he’ll never get any attention anymore

Oh, this is a better way to ride

He loves his purple teddy bear from great grandma eberle!

Three generations of Holmans (all good looking men)

Our artsy-fartsy photo, entitled, Liam with Peanut

Finally, it was a long day, and the boys needed their rest

We all survived Liam’s first Christmas

The boy’s cold/pneumonia seems to have gotten much better with time and antibiotics. His sleep, however, has been thrown all to hell. Before the cold, he was routinely doing 5 hours or so at a go, letting his parents get a moderate amount of rest. During the cold, well, all bets were off and we’re willing to cut him a sizable amount of slack. When you feel crappy, you feel crappy and don’t sleep well. Now that he seems to be much healthier, he’s holding steady at around 2 hours of sleep; and is desperately fighting going back to sleep without a feeding. This of course can all be blamed on the parents, because we’ve been violating the first bullet point in the Baby 411 books section on sleep. Don’t nurse or shush your baby to sleep and then sneak him into bed afterwards. He needs to go into the crib drowsy but still awake and fall asleep on his own. I can kind of understand the concept here. Imagine if every time you fell asleep in your nice comfy bed at home, at the end of your natural sleep cycle you woke up in a cardboard box in the city bus station. You’d wake up screaming too. The idea is to get him to accept as a calm and comforting place to sleep, his cardboard box in the bus station. That way, when he wakes up there, he’s not disoriented by his lot in life.

We’d meant to fix this situation but just hadn’t gotten around to it because he was sleeping, even if we had to coax him into it. Plus we were never really sure how to go about changing his behavior, and weren’t 100% in agreement with the methods described in the parenting books. Its hard to convince him that the crib is a nice place to fall asleep when the instant he passes over the edge of the rail he begins to cry and then escalate into a full blown pitching a fit. But, with the new year, and several nights of frustrating crappy sleep we realized something had to be done. I was up about an hour at a time, trying to shush a crying baby to sleep, multiple times a night, and none of us were getting nearly enough sleep. During the day, its hard to be properly loving and supportive to my dear child when, if he squawks to say that something is amiss in his life, my first response is frustration.

Up till now we’d been avoiding the Ferber method, which in summery is the “cry it out” method. Basically, you let him cry in bed, checking in periodically to let him know you’ve not abandoned him, but not picking him up or shushing him. After a period of time crying, he’ll figure out that he’s not going to be picked up and soothed and figure out how to soothe himself to sleep. But, after talking about some of the other suggestions and methods, Emily and I decided that this made the most sense for Liam and for us. Of course what the books don’t tell you is that sitting in the next room listening to your baby cry in anguish feels a lot like removing your own appendix. You know it needs to be done, but your still tearing out your own flesh with your bare hands.

Emily fed him, and we read him a story, and told him we loved him, then put him in bed and walked out of the room. And of course, he began to pitch a complete and utter fit. Once you’ve begun the process, of course, you can’t reasonably stop, go in and pick him up and say you were only kidding and shush little child, daddy’s here, because that would re-enforce the idea that crying in bed instead of sleeping would get mom and dad to come and pick me up. After what seemed like an age of crying and screaming and rolling around we decided that if he kept it up for an hour without settling, we’d give up on this attempt. Then we checked the clock and saw that a minute had passed since we put him down in bed.

He continued to cry, much as you would expect a baby left in a cardboard box in the bus station to cry. Each time we would go in to check on him at 5, 1o and 15 minute intervals, and reassure him that we were still there, but were not going to pick him up, he would cry even harder, much like you had just lit his cardboard box on fire. With the little bit of baby that I speak now, I’m pretty sure there was confusion, then cursing and anger and threats to put us in a home, and then begging and pleading that he’d promise be good, if we’d just come and pick him up, then, suddenly, at the 30 minute mark or so, he was suddenly quiet. The video monitor showed him not rolling around, but with an arm moving slightly. I tiptoed over to his door, and could hear him quietly breathing and actually asleep.

The system says that each time you do this, his crying time should shorten drastically as he learns to soothe himself, ending after 3 to 4 nights. Exactly on his current sleep schedule, 2 hours after he went to bed he woke up again, and we repeated the process, with him settling after about 20 minutes of crying. Right now we’re coming up on the 2 hour mark again, we’ll see what happens next. If I had any sense I’d have slept as much as possible, but I really needed to get this written. We’ve already notified the neighbors of our plans, and asked that they please not call the police or DSS. We’ll see how this comes out. In the beginning I was really worried that it wouldn’t take and that we’d be stuck either re-enforcing a bad behavior, or letting him cry for hours on end. The first attempts seem to have been positive though, however, wish us luck. Especially for Liam’s parents to survive it.

I hear rustling in the next room. I think the boy is awake again…