We’re Eight weeks in already. Eight weeks in the life of this amazing, sweet little boy. Eight weeks of our fabric/photo project. Eight weeks of 2% pure insanity and 98% pure joy. Yes, those statistics are arbitrary.

To celebrate this mini-milestone, it would seem that Finn has taken a liking to sleeping through the night. Please be assured that this has nothing to do with my awesome parenting skills (ha!) and everything to do with what Finn’s little body apparently needs. I’m not going to lie, we have done a bit of “experimenting” with scheduling/sleep training/crying it out/not crying it out/etcetera. A lot of it blew up in smoke a lot of the time but then you just try, try again. My philosophy, in my limited eight weeks of experience has been to allow him to wake up on his own during the night. (Besides those first couple of weeks when he needed to eat whether he wanted to or not.) Finn’s natural sleeping pattern at night has been every three to four hours. In my opinion, this is actually quite doable (read: pretty great) and I consider myself lucky that this has been a typical sleep schedule for him. Sometimes it would be fewer than 3 hours at a time but not too often. Finn slept through the night once for five hours pretty early on. Occasionally he’d go another five hours and one time even six. Whaaaat. And then back to the usual every three to four hours. In more recent weeks, he has been sleeping longer and longer, even giving us a couple of seven hour stretches. Of course this caused me to jolt out of bed and run in to check on him. Silly new mom. I think we may have had a breakthrough though because starting last Saturday and for the past four nights (insert happy Brie shoulder dance here), Finn has slept through the night for an average of seven hours. I know babies eventually sleep much longer than that every night but seven hours of sleep for four nights in a row?? We couldn’t be happier. (Ok, so last night it was over 8 hours and to any nursing moms out there….um ouch.)

Because Finn is about 2 months old now, I feel comfortable enough to start having some set (but flexible) routines for meal times, nap times and bed times. Now that he has finally started taking a couple of naps during the day, lo and behold, it is enabling him to sleep even longer at night. Using my handy dandy Baby ESP app for Android, I have been able to keep track of all of the details so that I can look for any developing patterns. I have learned several things: After 6pm, it’s best to feed him more frequently to 1.) keep the evening fussies to a minimum and 2.) get him good and stuffed and ready for a nice long sleep. I don’t mean every hour or anything, but it seems to work out well if I feed him every 2 hours or less after 6pm. He seems to wake up at the same time every day, around 5am, regardless of when he goes to sleep. So I can either put him to sleep at midnight (I assumed he needed to stay up and keep eating) OR, as I have recently learned, put him to bed by 9:45-10pm and he’ll be out like a light. Now, in this household, we’re ok with a little crying. As much as I would rather skewer my own eyeballs out than listen to Finn crying in a dark room by himself, we feel that it isn’t going to damage him in the long run. Now that I think of it, we’ve done quite a bit of laying him down in his crib awake (to inevitably cry). *cringe* We’ve also done quite a bit of laying him down in his crib after he’s fallen asleep in my arms. Both ways work. But for our family, it would seem that going in to his crib awake has enabled him to have his longest sleep periods. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence. In any case, now when we lay him in his crib, he cries for a very short bit, less than 5 minutes even, and may whimper and grunt around for a bit but he falls asleep on his own. Occasionally I will hear him wake up in the middle of the night and even cry for literally two seconds, and then go right back to sleep. I’m learning not to run in to check on him over every little thing. OH, and we also started closing his door so it would be completely dark in there. No night light, no music, no nothing. Maybe this is a no brainer, but we were leaving the door open intentionally so that he’d learn to sleep through various lights and sounds. That’s all good and well during the day, but at night, I am learning not to underestimate the power of a darkened room to foster a nice long sleep period.

Before you get all “oh no her baby din’t just sleep through the night” on me, let me just say this. I think Finn is just an easy baby. He has never gotten his nights mixed up with his days and he hasn’t been colicky or ever inconsolable. This MOST assuredly has nothing to do with us. I hear about other families who have “easy babies” and also hear about families who have the babies that won’t sleep and cry almost all the time. It’s not a game of comparison, people. It’s really kind of a crapshoot. Or rather, it’s whatever God ordains is good and necessary for your family. I need and it is good for me to be sanctified and if it’s not through the means of a fussy, difficult baby, then it will definitely be through some other means, no doubt about it.

Like today, when I watched A Baby Story and the expectant mother looked like a model wearing her pearl earrings and was carrying on pleasant conversations at eight centimeters and then pushed her baby out in 5 minutes. Yeah, not so much for me. Ha.

By the way, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Finn didn’t sleep at all tonight. Just because.

I mean, really, how could you not be? This face is literally the most amazing thing I have ever seen.

In order to help Dave learn a bit about photography, I have him using the camera on manual mode, switching between different focus points AND shooting wide open. Shooting wide open is no easy task for a beginner, nor is shooting in manual mode but he is doing a great job and really getting the hang of it. As for editing, I’m experimenting with a funky tone curve layer. I kinda like it.

Child endangerment or cute photo-op? You decide!