Decaf... And tears

I've been virtually caffeine free now for over A WEEK and I think I'm through the worst of the withdrawl. Score! I had been drinking regular coffee again ever since I went back to work, and it had really gotten out of hand. Whenever I would get one of my wicked migraines I would drink a TON of coffee hoping to take the edge off. So I was up to like 3 cups a day or more. Lately I've been contemplating making the switch back to decaf since Seth has been such a little pill at night and was showing NO SIGN of improvement no matter what we did. According to my research you should be able to have up to 5 cups of coffee without affecting your little one, so this may be only temporary. We'll see.

As for the tears… I've been letting Seth cry a little bit. I hate hearing it but I have to admit it works better than anything else we've tried. Against my better judgement we had really gotten into the bad bad habit of rocking him to sleep for almost every nap and bed time. For naps I think both of us - actually all THREE of us - were kind of enjoying the rocking. Eric and I really don't mind rocking in the chair with sleeping Seth in our arms. It's nice and relaxing and it's one opportunity we have to snuggle when he's not squirming to get down or reaching for something. During the day, it's nice. At night, multiple times a night, not so nice. Besides, both of us have fallen asleep in the chair holding him and that is just a recipe for a bump on the noggin if I ever heard one.

So he cries. For the last 3 days or so I've been roughly following the advice of Dr. Ferber and doing a progressive waiting method, starting with 3 minutes, then 5, then 7. About half the time he falls asleep before the 5 minutes is up, and I've never had to go in a 3rd time so far. Last night at bedtime he cried for less than a minute. A big change is that I do not pick him up at all when I go in and I only stay for about a minute or less. This has just been implemented at the start of a nap or at bed time. I'm not doing any timings in the wee hours yet because I'm still trying to catch enough z's to get through the work day, so he has been getting a feeding if it's been 5 or 6 hours. But in just a few days it seems we have already significantly decreased the number of other wake ups during the night which I think is helpful for daddy. I think I'll stick with this routine for awhile and see how it goes before I make any other drastic changes.