Sleep

Colin loves to sleep on me. I've written about that before, and how we didn't plan to co-sleep but kinda feel into it when we decided that getting sleep was more important than sticking to a plan we made before he actually arrived. It worked well, though at the beginning "sleep" mainly consisted of Colin sleeping on my chest. The first night in the hospital he was so pooped out he slept all night, not a peep out of him. The nurse came in around 4 to wake us up for his feeding (he had eated around midnight the night before) but we couldn't wake him up... extremely nervewracking and I realized then and there that a super quiet baby at night wasn't necessarily a good thing. After quite some time trying to wake him up it was decided that we'd take him to the nursery - ugh. I got ready to fight the nurses on the formula issue. Chris went with him immediately, I stayed for just a minute or two to tend to a few things, then met up with them in the nursery. Luckily, his glucose levels were great, which meant that I wouldn't have to fight the formula battle just yet. Turns out his core temp had dropped to about 97, which is very low for a newborn, and he was sleeping because he had to - no energy to be awake. The neonatal nurse wanted to keep him in the warmer for a few hours to bring his temp back up and promised he wouldn't get any formula, and that she would bring him back to us when he was better. With that, Chris and I headed back to our room to get some sleep.

The next night was much better. He acted like what I would expect a newborn to act like, but Chris and I decided to bring him to our bed. It was too hard for me to get in and out of the bed to get him when he cried, and honestly, we couldn' t take our eyes off him. That's how the co-sleeping started. He slept so much better when he was with us.

Our first night home from the hospital we learned that our beautiful plan didn't work so well. He fussed the entire time, and I finally went to the living room recliner and pseudo-slept with him on my chest all night. There was really no need for both of us to be completely sleep deprived, and Colin wasn't leaving my arms yet.

Luckily we discovered the miracle blanket somewhere around week 3 or 4 and ever since then he's only woken up once at night. Granted, he is an earlier riser (somewhere between 4:30 and 6am no matter what time he goes down for the night) but we've learned to adjust our schedules and to find nap time for us. Weekends are much easier to find time for a nap...

Right now Colin is asleep on my legs - and that's pretty much par for the course on naps - he really doesn't sleep well during the day unless he's napping on mom or dad (preferably mom). So, I have figured out how to do many things while he's napping on me...blog, clip coupons, catch up on emails, pay bills online...you get the drill. And while sometimes I think how great it would be if he napped in his crib so I could cook, clean, do laundry, use the bathroom etc... I know it won't be forever, and there will be a time that he won't want to nap on me and I'll long for this time. So for now, I'm just going to enjoy it.