today we are celebrating 7 days straight of sleeping 10 hours a night! i am of course the most excited about this. samuel has always been a great night sleeper from the beginning sleeping about 5 hours, but it's been a little more work to get more hours. definitely worth the time and he's such a happy baby as part of the result.

i read baby wise when i was pregnant and started the eat/awake/sleep cycle right from the beginning. although after a couple of weeks i stumbled upon the book 12 hours of sleep by 12 weeks, which basically reintroduced the eat/awake/sleep rhythm again with the intent of getting your baby to eventually sleep 12 hours at night by the time they are 3 months old. great i thought, but then i thought do i really want my baby to be sleeping 12 hours at night especially since he still has such a tiny tummy that really can't hold that much food at one time. well, i figured i might as well do the technique (which really isn't that ingenious) to get to at least sleep through the night on a consistent basis because i was still "slipping" him a bottle at 11pm to ensure that i would be able to at least sleep until morning.

as i was reading the book, it said this technique would be harder for a breastfed baby and that an alternative would be to pump and give a bottle to make sure he is getting the right amount of food to go the allotted amount of time. well i was already giving him a bottle about 50% of the time anyway so i figured i could just give it to him 100% of the time and get him on a real schedule that he can count on. plus... tah dah, i didn't like nursing. i know i know i'm a terrible mom! it just sucked though. like everything else in life it's nothing like i thought it would be! so i switched him over completely to a bottle giving him about 30 ounces a day and feeling like i was always pumping. i rarely did anything else! but knowing that my baby was getting enough and kinda sleeping through the night (i was still slipping him a bottle at 11pm).

well, i was told by a friend that is a mama that i probably wouldn't be able to keep up with the growing boy by pumping. i knew that i wanted to only give him milk for a while so i started getting paranoid because he was already drinking everything i was getting. nothing was going in the freezer! so last saturday after about 6 weeks of nothing but a bottle he drank his last. sunday morning i was dreading, but samuel was a champ. he whined for about 2 minutes (being conservative with the whining part) and then had a full feeding. fed him at 830 that night and he slept without anything until the next morning! i was encouraged to say the least. so we kept on. he seems like he's a lot more content without the bottle. i'm not sure why. it's almost like the bottle was making him more hungry because all he wanted to do was eat.

samuel has also aquired his own room. i just couldn't stand it anymore. i was waking up over every little breathing sound he made. so finally 2 weeks ago he got booted out. the first night was terrible, i was awake thinking about different scenario's of someone crawling in his window and taking him or because the fan wasn't directly over him blowing air down instead of a floor fan just blowing it around or what if i didn't hear him when he started to cry... ah! well, dave prayed for my fear and i was finally able to sleep. haven't thought of it since:)