the pic says it all

In the middle of a conversation with my sister Stephanie about the weekend in which she and Uncle Mike will meet Eden for the first time, she lamented that they had such a short amount of time with us and "what if Eden wasn't in a very good mood?" Well! I was shocked - Who would think such a thing? Eden in a bad mood? So I assured her that he was a very settled and happy baby and very rarely gets grumpy. "You better update your blog then" she replied...

So here I am, have been meaning to update for a while but just couldn't settle on a title or angle for the blab. I was thinking of calling it "OK, I admit it I'm in love" after the previous entry because of how gooey I've gone now that Eden has become so socially keen. It is hard to remember what it was like when he was a blank faced babe - a cute blank faced babe at that!

But that's not all. I've read a good book and put some things into practice. One of Duncan's collegues volunteered it to us just when I was thinking about doing some reading. I learned a number of things. Firstly, Eden is old enough to learn to put himself to sleep and to be guided in certain directions. Secondly, when he cries in his cot and nothing appears to be wrong (eg clean nappy, well fed, not sick) he is not really upset - he is just wanting that wonderful person who rocks his world to come back and be of service to him. More importantly, I am not going to emotionally damage him if I let him cry himself to sleep - the opposite is more likely to be the case because an overtired baby means a grumpy baby and a grumpy baby means a grumpy and overtired Mum.

In practice this now means that Eden on most occasions will sleep in his cot during the day yay. He has not done any of the growth spurty stuff where he wants to spend ages at the milk bar. His feeds are short and I have time to do stuff which is cool. We have also started to guide him into sleeping through the night. I said to Duncan "What does it mean that I feel like I'm going to miss those special times at 3am?"

I began to wake him about an hour before duncan and I wanted to be asleep and give him a feed. I then shortened his 3am feed by a minute every night for a week until it was nothing but a cuddle. Now he grizzles for a while and then goes back to sleep. I still have to wake him for his final evening feed and hopefully he will start to fully sleep through until 6amish regularly.

I am very blessed to have gotten used to getting up to Eden and I am not one of these parents who constantly complains about the lack of sleep - I just catch up at some other point which I never thought I would be able to do, but baby stuff on the mind is much easier to handle and less insomniatic than my former life.

The only period I've had bad sleep was when I started using our flash snazzipants and wonderoo cloth nappies in week 5. I didn't have enough nappies and was having a bit of trouble fitting the wonderoos properly so we were having a lot of leaks and I would lie awake tossing around in my head which kind of nappies I would buy and how many! Now I'm all fine and I feel like such a self righteous Green Party supporter without my rubbish bag full of disposables! I could be very evangelistic about cloth nappies if I let myself.

In the development stakes, a few things to report. Eden is slowly discovering the mirror in his baby gym and sometimes smiles and goos at himself. He loves to have a "conversation" with anyone wiilling to goo and gah at him (you will be richly rewarded with smiles and goos back.

He is now sporting a crop of lucious long eyelashes - it was amazing to see them grow week by week. He has the beginning of eybrows too but they are very blond. He still has little meaningful control over his limbs but his consciousness seems to have attached itself to his bowel motions. I used to get slightly annoyed at people saying "ooh he looks like he's filling his pants" and when you'd check they'd be nothing. Now he saves it all up until after his first morning feed. He gets a concerted look on his face, lets out a bit of a grunt, you well and truly hear the "movement" and then a moment later the relaxed smile!

So here we are blogging about poo. Parental fixation. Maybe you'll hear from Duncan at some stage about things other than Eden. Apologies if you have been in our lives recently and are not mentioned here. We did travel to Palmy for a few days last week and it was great to catch up with mateys. I also went to the cinema today for the first time in forever and saw The Worlds Fastest Indian which was fun. Class act Anthony Hopkins with almost a good kiwi accent. He got away with it by saying 'G'day' and 'mate' and 'blokes' and 'joker' a lot. My little joker needs some attention now so I better sign off.