Sleep

Sorry I haven't posted any pictures for a while. We spent the 4th at my parents' and then decided to stay this week so Anna could go to VBS at their church (which she had a BLAST going!). And for some reason I always forget to bring my USB cord to download pictures from my camera!!
Anyway, since I don't have any pictures, I'll just talk about Jacob's sleep. :D Yikes, it's been wacky! I don't even remember how long ago it started, but it's been a while (like well over a month). He just started waking up at least 2 times every night. Normally when he would start to do that, it meant a growth spurt. So he would eat at least 6 oz. (usually 8 oz.) and go right back to sleep. Usually the growth spurt only lasted a few days, a week max. But this just kept going and going. I didn't know what else to do b/c he had to be hungry since he was eating every time, right? Then he started acting like he was teething (which I still think he was/is, the tooth just hasn't made an appearance yet). Dad suggested that he wasn't actually hungry, he was just in the habit of waking up and eating in the middle of the night. Completely plausible (weird, but plausible) b/c the boy has no issues with eating enough food during the day! So we started just rocking him back to sleep instead of automatically feeding him a bottle, and whaddya know the kid would go back to sleep. There was one night when he was actually hungry, but all the other nights, he didn't need a bottle. So we figured out that he didn't need a bottle, but the problem was that he was still waking up. We couldn't let him cry it out b/c the kids share a room and we didn't want him to wake up Anna. Since we've been at my parents' this week, I put the kids in separate rooms. The first couple nights, he woke up once around 1 or 2am and I had to rock him back to sleep. He still woke up around 6am, but would take a bottle and go back to bed for an hour or so. By the 3rd night, he would only cry for a couple of minutes and then go back to sleep on his own (still eating a bottle between 6 and 6:30am and going back to sleep for an hour or so). By now I had a nasty cold/cough so Dad made me sleep upstairs and he slept downstairs with the kids. He said the 1st night he cried a couple times and when he tried a bottle at 6am, Jacob was asleep before he got 3 swallows down. And he's been sleeping all night (meaning no one has to rock him back to sleep, he might whimper or cry a bit, but I don't think he fully wakes up like he was before). This morning he didn't wake up for the day until 8:30 (granted, he didn't get to bed until 10pm b/c of Anna's VBS program)!! So I'm really hoping that our sleep problems with him are done! We'll find out when we get home, I guess. I know that I won't have the monitor on...I think that was part of the problem, too. I could hear him too well, so as soon as he started crying (which maybe was just a small cry, not fully awake), one of us would go in there so he wouldn't wake up Anna. I also found that she won't wake up to him crying for quite a while. So.......we shall see :) He's also given up his morning naps :( I don't remember when Anna did that, but it seems like it was later than 10 months! It's just amazing to me how easily these little ones can get into the habit of something like this. For those who don't know Jacob, trust me when I tell you the boy is not lacking in nourishment! And now that he's actually slept through the night (like he had for so long before) without eating, I know that he really didn't need to eat in the middle of the night.
Sorry to bore you with all of that. But that's about all I've got without pictures! :)