This week I have been desperately trying to get LB into an afternoon nap routine. He is fighting me every inch of the way. Today I thought we would have success because as I fed him his bottle his eyeballs began rolling back into his head- a sure sign he is ready for sleepy time. I whisked him away to his dark, shaded bedroom, put on his lullaby CD and fed him the rest of his bottle. Upon completion I gave him his pacifier and rocked him for a few minutes before placing him in his crib. After I put him down he stirred a little but pretty much stayed asleep. "YAY! It worked" I thought. Nope, our wonderfully protective dog decides to bark at a random passing car and immediately shakes the baby awake causing him to spit out his pacifier and to start screaming at the top of his lungs. I wouldn't be surprised if the neighbors could hear him next door. I replaced the pacifier to his open, howling mouth and entered into a game of "mommy gives baby the pacifier, baby uses his uncoordinated hands to keep knocking out his pacifier." It was like his hands had a mind of their own and not controlled by his brain at all. Kind of like how a cat and its tail move independent of each other. I decided to trick LB's hands into thinking they were removing the pacifier from his mouth by giving his hand another pacifier. HA HA! Success! He laid there clutching one pacifier and sucking on another. Yah, successful until I tried to quietly tiptoe out of the room and ended up tripping over one of his noisy toys. Ugh! And the dance begins again.
This comedy of errors continues on another forty minutes until I finally get him to take his pacifier and get out of his room before he loses it again. Not five minutes pass before he is ululating again! I go back and try to rock him to sleep for the 2nd time. While in the rocking chair I am having a flash back to my younger years when, as a child, my parents tried to enforce nap time on me. I was and still am not one for doing something I am not fond of. I hated taking naps and would throw the world's largest temper tantrums. Unfortunately for my parents, I think that was a regular occurrence. I place LB in the crib and snuck out again.
As I sit in the living room with the baby monitor by my side hoping for LB to stay asleep I text my husband to stay away from the house during lunch time at all costs in hopes that I can keep this baby asleep for even thirty minutes. Before I could hit send LB was stirring again. This time he pulls out all the stops, wailing at the top of his lungs. It breaks my heart to hear my baby cry but I wanted to practice the Ferber Method (letting the child cry it out) at this point so I sat there for only about five minutes and listened to him cry all the time thinking about the old adage that, "if you were a difficult child then you will get it back two fold with your little one." Now, I have the world's sweetest baby ninety percent of the time (of course I think that, he's mine! LOL!) but when he is hungry or it's nap time, watch out! The other ten percent he is his mother's son all the way. So for the last and final try I walk in to LB's room to find my child clinging on to the side of his crib with all his might and his toothless mouth gumming one of the wooden slats! He looked so sad... but funny. At the time I had a hard time seeing the humor in it all as I was SO frustrated but now looking back on the image of my 4 1/2 month old trying to "chew" (for lack of a better term) his way out of nap time is all too funny.
Needless to say, he won the battle today but I intend to win this war!
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