zipadeedoodah* happy update

*warning- boring baby sleep training stuff ahead*

ermagherd.  last night joaquin slept one 3 hour stretch, then we soothed him a bit, then he slept for five glorious hours.   this is not ideal, yet, but it’s progress from where we’ve been.  HOWEVER, the most important part of last night’s situation was that he went MORE THAN NINE HOURS without a feeding.   finally.   the few nights before this we dropped one of two nighttime feedings, then his amazing new "zippy"  arrived yesterday afternoon.
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to back up a bit, joaquin slept in his crib, swaddled from about the first week of january until about january 27th, which is when his FIRST, medium-sized zippy arrived.  the zip-a-dee zip was invented to transition babies that are used to sleeping swaddled out of the swaddle.  it gives them freedom to move, but their hands are tucked in so they feel more snug.  

 
 
he actually slept REALLY well in it the first night.   but around that same time, he also became very proficient in rolling over onto his belly, but not AS proficient as rolling back.   so he would wake up on his belly, get frustrated that he couldn’t get back in a position that felt comfortable, and then turn on the wahhhs.   since then, he’s been sleeping pretty erratically in the zippy.  some good nights, some bad.  the issue seemed to be that we ordered a medium, and he really should still be in a small so he would feel more "tucked in."   but the PROBLEM with the zippys – only one lady makes them, and she recently suffered a miscarriage (so sad), so she’s been really backed up with orders and shipments.   

so anyway.   we decided to order a small anyway, knowing it might take some time to get here.   it finally arrived YESTERDAY, so we were eager to put it to the test.    so last night he went down at 8ish or so.   he woke up around 11ish, and i went in and soothed him, and he fell back asleep within about 10 minutes.   he didn’t wake up again until 4a!   by this point, he hadn’t been fed since 7:45p, which meant he had gone over 8 hours without a feeding.  the LONGEST he’s EVER gone is 7 hours, and that was a fluke a more than a few months ago.  normally he feeds every 4-5 hours.   but aaron was able to get him to go back to sleep within about 15 minutes.   then, he woke up 45 minutes later and since it had been 9 hours or so since his last feeding, i decided to go in and nurse him back to sleep.   he then slept for another hour or so and then we were up for the day.   

so while SLEEP is still broken up into chunks throughout the night, at least we are finally teaching him that he doesn’t need to eat in the middle of the night.  the next step is to work on letting him soothe himself to sleep when he wakes up in the night.. and eventually we hope to get 9-10 hours of UNBROKEN sleep out of him.  MAYBE EVEN 12.   but i won’t get too ambitious yet.  well.. we shall see.

here he is in the new zippy, taking a catnap this afternoon..
 

zip, zip, zippy!

anyway.   

in other news, we started giving him micro-tastes of avacado this past week.  he wants to be a big boy and eat real food SO BAD, but we are holding off a bit longer to introduce food for reals.    this week he will get some micro-tastes of banana.  SO exciting.   it is.

*** EDIT***
i just wanted to interupt your regularly scheduled programming to say last night was EVEN BETTER than the last!!  he went 10 hours without feeding and had two 5-hour stretches of sleep followed by another 2 hours.  we might have FIXED OUR BABY!    only… 2 months after he stopped sleeping well.    HALLELUJAH!    SO THIS is what it feels like to wake up well-rested.    HOT DAMN!

bye.