Star-fishing

I love it when my baby goes down and spreads his arms in his favourite sleep-time starfish position.  Apart from looking unbelievably cute, it is usually an indication of the fact he is going to stay asleep for a while.

Today has been quite neat in terms of routine and sleep:

7am wake up, nappy change (with daddy) and feed.
Time in the bouncer while I rushed round like a mad woman doing some cleaning.
9:15-9:55 Nap
9:55 Feed

We then went over to Woodville Sure Start Centre for a mums and babies group.  It is a particularly nice group and Mondays are fun because they have song-time, which helps me remember and learn new nursery rhymes.  On the way back he fell asleep in his car seat (no dummy) at about ten to midday.  By some miracle I managed to pick him out of his car seat and transfer him into a blanket and into cot.  He did wake and moan but the dummy helped him drift back off.

11:50 Nap
13:35 Feed

After this feed we had some lovely playtime at home with tummy time, songs and silly voices.  He enjoys this a lot so there was lots of smiling.  At 17 weeks he is starting to grab things more and so his play-mat has had a new lease of life and he concentrates really hard to co-ordinate his hand to grab hold of the toys dangling down.  This seems a lot more purposefully to the random hitting he used to do.  I was never sure if he was doing it meaningfully or by accident!  We had visitors this afternoon, which was nice.

14:15 Nap
15:00 Feed

During the next lot of activity time I had to keep things low key as he kept bringing up his milk.  He was interested in our visitors and had a small amount of time on his play-mat and in his bouncer.

I then had a bit of a dilemma.  Following the pattern today, I have put him down to sleep two hours after he last woke up and this seems to have worked well in terms of him going down well.  In theory the next nap-time was 17:00 but it worried me that having a sleep now will make his bedtime later and harder.  But if I didn't let him sleep I could end up with an overtired baby.  In the end, I decided to put him down for a nap but to limit it to twenty minutes.  That way, by rights he should be ready for a sleep again at around half 7.  This would be perfect!  Let's see what happens...

So far, the night-time regimen hasn't really changed anything.  For a start, he doesn't take the bottle very easily.  We have had to mix the bottle with the breast in order for him to remember to suck the bottle rather than chewing the teat.  Although it has been tricky, he did take more milk from the bottle on the second night compared with the first so I am confident we will continue to see improvements.  As for middle of the night feeds, I have been a bit remiss in keeping a note of times of feeds and have ended up feeding him 'just in case.'  I am resolved tonight to be more organised with it all and resolute about settling without feeding.  All the best intentions!