Successful Sleep Training!

This week has been exciting!  Gabriel has been swaddle-free for about a week and started sleeping from 7-7:30pm until 5:30am!  (That was not an instantaneous thing by any means.  We had many nights of multiple random wake-up times... ok, not that many honestly.  It was about a week's worth of poor sleep.)  For Mother's Day, I even got a 6am wake-up!

• Speaking of Mother's Day, it was my first!  I got a lovely card from Craig and spent the day cuddling with my beautiful son (though he did not nap a WINK all day and I was nervous going into bedtime with that knowledge weighing on my mind...).  I made Craig take some Mommy & Son pictures for Mother's Day.

 

I only have eyes for Mommy - relaxing before Mass

Passed out, but not for long!  Seriously, only 10 minutes max!

• We had a lovely Mother's Day dinner at Deb's house to celebrate Craig's Mom.  I got a few cute pictures of Gabriel with Grammy.  (Gabe wore his "I love my Grammy" onesie in honor of Barbara!)

 

Trying to pet "Johnny"

7-yr-old great-nephew Evan took a selfie with Gabriel

• At 27 weeks, Gabriel is a crazy man!  He rolls and rolls and rolls when you put him down.  Oh, that and screams!  We are very not fond of the separation anxiety that seems to have stuck since he turned 6 months old.  He is especially attached to Mommy (or maybe it's the milk supply, as Craig believes, haha!)

•  "Baby Dances at Night" strikes again!

Pacifier staring contest

"I'm a Little Teapot"

Waiting patiently for Mommy to come get him one morning

• I got a lucky shot the other day with this strange "aerial view" angle.  I loved it so much that I took a few others the same way!

My favorite one (& the first one)

• With the onset of summer (hello, where did Spring disappear to?!) weather, we set up the pack 'n' play out on the deck under the big umbrella for Gabriel to enjoy being outside with us.  (Let me clarify:  I personally could not get the pack 'n' play set up.  I called in reinforcements (aka Craig) to set it up.)  I also broke out the frozen teething toys (one looks like a hand and another like a foot!) for Gabe.

The fitted sheet over the top kept the pollen out

Some videos from the week (click on each phrase to see the videos):
Playing with exersaucer
Happy 1st Mother's Day
Laughing contest
On the way to crawling

Other pictures from the week:

Thanks for the floor tiles, Uncle Gregory & Auntie Christina!

"The camera AGAIN, Mom?"

The Contortionist

Happy Half-Birthday!

Wahoo!  Gabriel is 6 months old!  Craig & I can't even believe it's already been that long since his birth.  He also turned 26 weeks old the following day, so here are those pictures.  (And let me tell you how difficult it is getting to take a picture where he is not moving or trying to grab the number blocks!  I will admit that I had to "photoshop" the 6 month picture to get the blocks in because he was having a ball playing with them!)

• We have been successfully breastfeeding for 6 months!  I am so happy that things have been going well for so long and hope we can make it to 1 year.  (Found this certificate online & personalized it for fun)

• Babcia visited this weekend.  You could tell Gabriel recognized her a little.  She had a blast with him, and I got to capture some fun moments of them together.

Had to include this one - totally looks like she is trying to lift him by his legs, haha!

• Sleep training continues.  We are back to a 4:15-4:45am wake-up time for eating, but I can't see that it would be a positive move to withhold nursing at that time.  He's been asleep for 9.5+ hours and I myself would be hungry by that point too!  I will be asking the pediatrician about this at his 6 month appointment next week.  In the meantime, he occasionally breaks out of his swaddle.  I got a few fun "Baby Dances at Night" pictures:

"Walk like an Egyptian"

"YMCA"

• I put on this crazy "loud" outfit the other day, including these random blue, orange, & white shoes that I bought for a song online (they looked a lot more conservative when I saw them in the picture, but oh well, babies don't necessarily need to wear neutral).

 

• We are working on sitting with Gabe.  (He now rolls over both ways all on his own very frequently!)  He is doing better in the seat that Nonno got him, and he's very secure when you give him just a little support to sit in your lap.  I can't wait for him to sit on his own - I want to get a picture of him in the grass outside in front of my tulips & daffodils.  Hopefully we will make it in time!  He does a little face-plant when he gets off balance, but sometimes that makes for a very cute photo op:

•  Gabriel has been loving on the cats recently (and they on him!).  I think they realize that he is a good source for petting (and unfortunately, sometimes pulling fur, but they are pretty tolerant).  Here's a shot of Zephyr enjoying his new little brother:

 Other pictures from the week:

Mr. Serious

Baby blues

I have no idea what was so funny...

The onesie says "Snuggle-saurus"

Bad hair day

Fun with "Paint" - Baby Cupid!

Fell asleep with his hood over his eyes & his tongue sticking out

The Beginnings of Sleep Training

Well, this week Gabe turned 25 weeks, and I decided it was time to try to night-wean him (aka get him to sleep past 3 or 4 in the morning to a more reasonable wake-up time).  Granted, he sleeps well from 7:30pm to sometime between 2-5am typically, but 5am or later would be more reasonable in my opinion!  I am a morning person, but not 3 or 4 in the morning!

I didn't think I'd be the biggest fan on "cry-it-out" (leaving him alone in his crib crying until he fell back asleep), so I am working with waiting a minute or two after he starts crying before going into the room and then soothing him by patting or rubbing his belly and popping his pacifier back in & staying until he falls back asleep.  NO picking him up and NO nursing.  Oy, it's hard!  Previously, when he would wake, I would nurse him and he'd be back asleep in 10 minutes or less.

So, our first night of this not-so-structured sleep training was spent with on and off crying (aka wailing since he has no "soft" volume) from 3-4am.  It wasn't straight through the hour, and, every time I said I would pick him up if he continued one more minute, he would stop and seem to go back asleep.  Finally, he passed back out around 4 and slept all the way till 6:20.

The next night he slept 7:30-5:00.  A fluke; I am now sure of it!

The third night, he woke at 3am again, but it only took a half hour of on & off crying to get him to fall back asleep (with my rubbing his belly and putting the pacifier back in).  The next day was Sunday; he took a cat nap during the last half of Mass, but then he had TWO 2-hour-long naps during the rest of the day!  Impressive, since Gabe is more often a cat-napper (20-45 min) and rarely takes naps over an hour.  We'll see how things continue as time goes on...

(Wow, I did not expect to take half of the blog talking about sleep training!  My apologies to anyone who has since nodded off to sleep themselves!  ...But perhaps this is good documentation for when he's an adult so I am able to tell him he was a pain at least for ONE aspect of his infancy!  He really is a good baby overall.)

Gabriel hit a few milestones earlier this week.  He managed to figure out how to roll from his back to his belly (click here for a video) and started making a "pthhhh" noise (that video here; sorry it's a bit dark - tough lighting in the evening with my phone's camera).  I am still working with him on sitting up on his own, but he is much more sturdy than before.  I also found that we can now "dust" a piece of fabric over Gabe's face and get lots of giggles (video here)!

This week we also attended the christening of Hudson (Gabe's Godparents' new little guy).  I have no idea how the ceremony went, as I was the honorary photographer (and I hope Chelsea got at least a few good shots from what I took!) and was kind of distracted with that, but I am sure Deacon Ron did a nice job as usual.  Craig, Gabe, & I dressed to match in various shades of purple (had to use his suit from Auntie Lorene again before it gets too small!). 

[On a side note, I never realized how difficult it is to find something to wear when you are a nursing mom.  I have all these lovely dresses, but many of them are not convenient for nursing.  That's why you'll see that I changed to a more suitable outfit at the after-party in one of the pictures below.  Most tops are ok because you can layer with a nursing tank top, and one shirt goes up as the other goes down to provide a lot of modesty coverage.  But that's definitely not the case with dresses with high necklines!]

Craig & his mini-me

The Kozaczka's awaiting the start of Hudson's baptism ceremony

Gabe & his Godmother at the after-party

Fun at the after-party

Lastly, I decided to pull apart my frozen breastmilk stash and figure out how much I really have (out of curiosity and the fact that I would like to not have to pump during work when I return in August.  Not to mention pumping at night is becoming really tiresome!).  Turns out I have 405 oz in 3-oz bags, plus 2 gift bags full of breastmilk bags of unknown volumes (I am "guestimating" 25+ oz).  So, at about 430 oz, that is about 14 days of milk if Gabe doesn't nurse and takes approximately 30 oz per day.  Too much math for you?  Haha!  I figured out that I can make up at least 2-3 weeks worth more over the summer by pumping at night.  (And if I can get the worm sleeping longer, I can spread out my pumping times and get more sleep of my own!)

Normally, I would add some other pictures from the week here, but I accidentally put a lot of them in the last blog post.  Oh well!  Here are a few I missed:

Halfway into 1st 2-hour nap (via the video monitor)