Letter to our 10.5 month old

Dear William,

This week on 10/25/2012, you turned 46 weeks or 10.5 months old.

The big thing this week for you has been your nap schedule.  I know, I know.  Again with the sleep obsession.  The thing is, and a lot of people don’t realize it, but sleep is just as important as nourishment.  I wouldn’t fail to offer you your milk or food, so why should I fail to offer you your sleep?  On Sunday I decided to try and flip flop your nap schedule.  So, instead of limiting your morning nap to 40 minutes, I decided to limit it to 1.5 hours and then offer a snooze in the afternoon.  Except what happened was, you pushed your wake time to 10:30am and slept for 1.5 hours and woke up naturally and then refused your afternoon snooze completely.  As a result, since you’d already done a single nap day, I decided to push you to one nap a day for 4-5 days just to see how it goes.  I decided to start your first nap closer to 11:30am, which pushes your awake time by one hour from when you had pushed it the day prior, so your nap would hopefully stretch further into the afternoon.    Monday it worked great, you slept for 2.5 solid hours.  Tuesday the gardeners outside your window and your butt pooping woke you after 40 minutes and despite best efforts you refused a second nap, but were pleasant and laughing until your bedtime.  On Wednesday, you slept 1.5 hours.  The thing is, I doubt myself every step of the way, thinking that maybe we’re pushing you to this too soon, you are so young!  But you seem to be tolerating the longer wake times well and so far it’s not impacting your night sleep, and we seem to have eliminated those early wake times.  Of course, just when we get this all worked out, we have the challenge of upcoming time change, as well as travel to a different time zone to contend with.

Since we’re changing your nap time, we also have had to change your bottle feeding strategy.  You have a milk/sleep association (as well as a Froggy/sleep association) and, as a result, since we don’t want you to fall asleep on your first bottle, your grandma is feeding it to you downstairs.  Which means you’re more interested in activities than finishing that bottle.  So what you don’t drink then is being added to your lunch/nap bottle.

Last Friday your grandma D. took you to the grocery store. You love to look at the balloons there, so it’s always a treat for you to go “grocery” shopping.  She sent me a text message later and asked if you normally make smacking noises while going through the produce section.  She then told me that you definitely recognize the fruit and vegetables as food.  The next day, we went to Walmart to buy you some bananas.  I was carrying you on my arm and holding the bunch of bananas in the same hand.  I felt you leaning over, and saw that you were touching one of the bananas but didn’t think much of it.  As we neared the check-out, I noticed you were becoming more and more interested in the bananas I was holding and then you leaned over and started licking one of them.  By the time we were checking out, you had managed to bust through the banana peel and were happily eating your banana. I offered the gooey mess to the cashier to ring up so I could pay for it. Surprisingly, she declined. She might have been laughing too hard.  I was halfway between amused and mortified.  I didn’t think you’d be able to get through the peel or should I say WANT to get through the peel — yuck! As your father unnecessarily pointed out, though, and I quote, “He has teeth.”   Here is your first (and hopefully only) mug shot.

This past Saturday was full of fun activities.  Starting the day off right with a swim (for me) and a nap (for you).  We had brunch with your godmother.  The restaurant where we met is off of a very busy street, so we sat on a bench near the street and watched the cars go by.  The bench was the perfect height for you to stand on the seat part and hold to the top of the back and look over.  You were so happy!

Afterward, we went to the local children’s resale shop and, there, hanging on the pegboard was a Froggy Lovey, identical to the one you love so much!  We now have a spare for $1.99. Yesssss!!  You grinned at it when you saw it, then proceeded to grab it out of my hand, jam it in your mouth and when the clerk tried to take it from you, you YELLED at him. AHHHHH!!!

A final highlight of our Saturday together was to attend the Autumn festival at our local park.  With Halloween decorations, costumed characters, trick-or-treat stations and craft stations throughout, it was a fun little activity for us to do together. Your grandma D.  joined us on our outing, and it was a nice way to welcome the holiday season ahead.

Development:  You weigh 27 pounds 5.5 ounces and are currently fitting into 18 month size clothing, and some 24 month sizes.  You still have an incredibly long torso and short legs… meaning shorts hit you about mid-calf and pants, if they fit you around your waist, are about 5 inches too long.  I bought some Babies R Us brand sleepers in 18 month size last year,  but I think they’re intended more for walkers than crawlers, because you HATE them… they don’t stretch enough for you to crawl in, but would probably be fine if you were walking.  Diaper inserts?  Since we’ve gone to one nap, a longer nap, we now need to double stuff the diaper you wear during your nap… one day we didn’t and you wet through it.  No walking as of yet, still crawling like an Olympic champion and standing for longer and longer periods of time.  You’ve started doing a weird crawl, where you are crawling on your feet instead of your knees sometimes.

Things I want to remember about you this week:  The way you find things to entertain yourself, for example, you started crawling and pushing your toy cars.  You have several and there’s one that’s just not user friendly for that, but you persisted getting more and more frustrated about why it kept flipping over when the other one you have doesn’t.  You will also grab hold of the base of my office chair and push it around and around in a circle.  While I’m not thrilled with it, you also love to flush the toilet.  If I wanted the feeling of an auto-flush toilet at home, I would just let you in the bathroom with me.  The way you love to leave under your own power from your Music Together class on Mondays and crawl all the way down the long, long hallway.  The way your face lights up and you start to laugh when you see me when I get home from work. How you unlatch if you drop Froggy while nursing to search for him and say, “uh uh uh uh uh, Uh oh!”  How you love having your daddy home these days because he’s got a new part-time, work-from-home job.  Along those lines, the way you search for your father when I’m nursing you and smile at him while you nurse.  Every morning after I leave for work, your father takes you out in the stroller to “check out your hood”.  He always sends me a text message with a picture of the two of you and I desperately look forward to those pictures.  Your father also looks through my Facebook posts and blog posts for pictures that I post of you so he can “steal” them.

I found some birthday invitations online with wheels on them.  They seemed perfect for you as we’ve decided to do your first birthday party themed around wheels — you love wheels!  I mailed them out this past week.  I know it seems early to do so, but since your birthday falls in December, it’s a pretty busy month for social obligations.  The thing is, I wasn’t even going to do a first birthday party for you at all, as I’m pretty anti-social.  However, it seems wrong not to celebrate the milestone of the first year of your life having been lived, and that’s really what birthday parties are about to me, not receiving gifts, for you have everything that you need.  But rather that your life is a gift to us.

On Tuesday morning you woke and cried out at 2am. This is not a big deal to me, as our routine is that you get one middle of the night nursing, if you don’t cry out for it then I will go to you no later than 4 am.  So when you cried, I got up and went to the restroom and then checked the video monitor because you had gotten quiet. It was quite possibly one of the saddest things I’d ever seen. You had sat yourself in the corner of your crib with your back against the rail.  You had shoved Froggy in your mouth and were sitting there, quietly sobbing into him.  My eyes get teary just remembering. I went in and pulled you out of your bed and held you close for a minute, feeling your little body against mine as you sniffled… perhaps it was a bad dream, I don’t know, but you needed me. You were hungry and felt a little chilled, both were solved by the act of nursing.  When you finished eating and unlatched, you laid there quietly on my lap.  I could see in the dim light that your eyes were open, but it seemed that you just wanted to be held.  I understand, we all need to be held sometimes, I think.   So, for those few quiet minutes in the middle of the night, I simply held my baby boy.  My baby who is growing into a little boy all too fast.

Love, Momma