Give me a break!

According to most doctor recommendations, a four-month old is supposed to take 2-3 naps a day for a total of 4-5 hours or so in addition to an evening of 10 hours of sleep. Conversely, the infant is supposed to be awake for about nine hours of the day.

Emerson decided he would only take one nap today for a total of one hour. He has decided he doesn't like to go to sleep; more specifically, he won't go to sleep for me. Apparently, Amber has something I don't. It's not just that when he's with me he thinks its time to play either. All the methods I used to have up my sleeve to get him to take a nap simply don't work anymore. I've tried walking him around the neighborhood in an Infantino or in a stroller to lull him to sleep. I tried driving him around town. Doesn't work. He just looks around these days. I'll rock him, sing to him, put him in a dark room, lay down with him... all to no avail. For a while, we thought maybe he just wasn't getting enough to eat—which is also problematic, as it means he thinks he can only fall asleep if he's eating. So today, I stuffed him full. It worked the first time. And when he woke up twenty minutes into his nap I was able to rock him and use a bottle to get him to fall back asleep. Forty minutes later? Not a chance. A little while later, when the bags under his eyes made it obvious he was tired, I tried feeding him more. He got to the point that he was pushing the bottle away. He just keeps wanting to stay awake, keeps getting his “second wind” (and third, and fourth...).

Two days ago, I had similar issues but it wasn't as bad. He slept for a total of two hours that afternoon. At one point, after wrestling with him to go to sleep, I finally set him down on his belly so he could look around, and he looked straight at me with a big grin, as if to say, “Ha! I win!” Later, I laid down with him in bed and sang to him to see if that would work. Then, I stopped singing and closed my eyes to feign sleep (which, amazingly enough does work sometimes in the early morning when he wakes up at 5AM and we want him to go back to bed. Apparently, if there's no one to give him attention, he figures he might as well sleep). Instead, he started smacking me in the face and stuck his finger up my nose. He's four months old and he already knows. I can't trick this kid. Like this morning when I was playing with him and his toy lion and trying to get him to think that the lion was talking to him: Every time I would say something in the “lion voice” he would turn his head away from the lion and look straight at me as if to say, “Are you kidding me?”

So tonight, Amber gets home, feeds him, and he falls right to sleep. We're going out to dinner. I pick him up five minutes later and put him in the car seat. He fidgets a bit more than normal but he stays asleep. Good deal. Before we get out the door, he's awake again. By the time we get to the restaurant, he's hit his wall and starts complaining that he's tired and finally finds solace in sucking the life out of his fingers and blanket.

Child-rearing is easy(ier) until they start becoming sentient creatures. Yeah, its only going to get more difficult.

For the first time in my life, I wish I could grow a boob. It would have to be retractable. “Go go gadget boob!” Bam! And after I settled Emerson down from my retractable boob poking him in the eye, maybe he would finally take a nap.