One giant leap

Joseph hadn't slept well for weeks. If it wasn't a cold or cough to keep him awake, then it was teething or traveling or ear infections.

But by the second week of January, all of that seemed to have dissipated, and yet he still wasn't sleeping well at night.

To be honest, it was a little demoralizing. We had been so proud of ourselves for getting him to sleep through the night at 7 weeks. We would tell friends our formula that we had adapted from The Baby Whisperer -- always respond when the baby cries, but put him back as soon as he was calm, and repeat as necessary. Once he got a little bit bigger, we told ourselves that he was big enough to sleep through the night, and so we would still respond -- but always with the pacifier first (assuming he just wanted to suck). If he didn't accept that, then and only then would I feed him.

And it worked for us. One morning in July, I called my mom in excitement. "He only woke up twice in the night! And both times he took the pacifier!"

The next night, he didn't wake up til 6. We felt like champs. The next few months went fairly well in terms of sleeping through the night. It was a difficult adjustment to Eastern time for him, but once he went down he usually stayed down, except when he had a cold.

Yet here we were again, with a 7 month old baby who hadn't slept well at night since November. He seemed perfectly happy in the daytime, most of the time. Naps hadn't suffered too much. He didn't seem sick anymore. He just wasn't sleeping like he used to.

In fact, he was even eating at night again -- 3 full meals, even. Once I realized that, I thought, "Oh, of course! He needs solid food!" But he wasn't loving it. Rice, oatmeal, pears . . . you had to sneak it into his mouth, and he rarely swallowed it.

One day, in frustration I went to the Wonder Weeks book. The idea in the book is that babies go through "leaps" in which the world changes dramatically. I estimated how many weeks old Joseph was and tried to find that section. To my dismay, he was at an age where he was supposed to be quite pleasant by any calculation. Fine, I thought. Maybe they calculated wrong. Are there new skills he's supposed to have developed? As I went through the checklist, I saw that very few of the skills from the previous leap had been acquired. "Stupid European babies . . . they're more advanced than American babies at this age," I thought. Problem was, the book had assumed that babies were crawling by 5-6 months. And Joseph was nowhere near that. He could scoot backwards on his tummy and could move around sitting up but had shown very little interest in crawling.

I was at a loss. He was eating like a newborn, sleeping like a newborn . . . what was up? I would talk to mothers of younger babies who were sleeping just fine. I would tell myself, "Sleeping through the night shouldn't be a goal, anyway." But it still bothered me that I had gone from an expert of sleeping babies to utterly clueless. I assumed he was going through a growth spurt, but when would it end?

Finally, two weeks ago, I buckled down. It was time for solid foods. I decided to give oatmeal a third try. To my amazement, he ate it! More miraculously, he liked it the next day! When we introduced bananas, he gobbled them up. He would open his mouth for more, something he had never done before! My heart leaped. Would I finally get to stop nursing around the clock?

Yes. After a few days of solid foods, he would take the pacifier rather than the breast when he woke up at night. Between that and him rolling onto his tummy and needing us to turn him back over, he still kept us up a bit at night, but the night feedings were over. And gradually, he started sleeping longer and longer stretches again. Thursday morning, he didn't wake us up until 6 (and then after his feeding, slept til 9). I was full of milk, and I was happy.

And within a matter of days, things started to turn around. Little teeth started to poke up. He started to seriously try to crawl and watch us as we crawled. On Thursday he crawled on his feet rather than on his knees. On Friday he crawled on his knees rather than on his feet.

And just like that, we had a mobile, solid-food-eating, considerably heavier baby than the Joseph of just a few weeks ago. One small step for man, one giant leap for Baby Moon.

Now, if only those teeth would completely break through . . .