Let's start with the good news! Locke is 4 days shy of 5 months old, and today we finally hit one of the biggest, most important milestones there is: he slept through the night. Now, I grant you, it was only 6 hours, which I think is the minimum to be considered sleeping through the night, but I'm still pretty stoked. He went down at 9:30 last night, was back up at 10:30, and it took me half an hour to get the little guy back to sleep. Then I went to bed myself, and the first time he woke me up was 5:00 am. I got up and nursed him, and put him back in bed (it's 7:30 and he's still asleep), and tried to go back to sleep myself...only to realize that I can't sleep anymore. 6 straight hours of sleep and I feel as if I slept a week! This is the most consecutive sleep I've gotten since he was born. Heck, since probably the second trimester. I had a steady 3 am date with a full bladder every day of my third trimester, as I recall.
Do I think this will suddenly become a regular thing? No, especially not since just yesterday he was up every hour and a half. But he has shown me that he *can* sleep through the night, which gives me hope that someday, he will. You know, consistently.
I have to say, more than anything else, his inability to fall asleep and stay asleep has really made me second guess myself as a parent. I know most parents (especially new ones) have constant feelings of doubt or inadequecy, and I try to remind myself of that to talk myself out of being down on my fitness as a parent. But I know kids 3 months younger than Locke who sleep 7 hours a night or more. I've read 3 books on baby sleep, and the sleep sections of several general baby guides, and I'm still tearing my hair out trying to figure out what it is I'm doing wrong. Maybe it's nothing, and Locke just isn't a sleeper (I don't know any other kids like that, but I keep reading that they exist). Hopefully today is the light at the end of this tunnel. We shall see.
And now for the bad news. I'm also waiting for Locke to wake up so I can change his diaper and call his pediatrician. Last night, when we changed his diaper right before bed, he had what looked like a blood spot in an otherwise wet diaper. After initially feeling quite disturbed (I wouldn't quite say panicked, because this is the only sign we have had that anything might be wrong with him), we did a bit of research online and suspect that either a)he threw some uric acid crystals in with his urine, which could be a random, normal occurence (though this usually happens with younger babies), or could indicate some messed up body chemistry (dehydration? kidney trouble?) OR b) could actually be blood, which would probably point to a urinary tract infection. I suspect it was uric acid and not blood, because as the diaper has dried, the spot has stayed red-orange, rather than turning brown like you'd expect blood to do. Either way I'm worried, and I'm looking forward to the pediatrician's phone lines opening up, so I can find out more (and see if they want to see him today).
In other news! Matthew had his 30th birthday. It was a damned good one as these things go...a few days prior to the big day, we traded in the Corolla he's been driving for a shiny (almost) new 2009 Honda Fit. He loves this car. It's a manual transmission, which he really prefers (though it means I'm going to have to learn to drive a stick), and it's a little subcompact thing, that still has 4 doors, space for the baby, and adequate cargo room in the trunk. Matthew really prefers small cars, but of course we had to have something that would be baby-friendly. It really fit the bill, and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it was about as close as a perfect car for Matthew as we could ever hope to find.
For his actual birthday, we drove out to Virginia Beach and stayed at a hotel on the boardwalk. Neither of us had been before, and we found that we really liked it, though it was a bit weird. Weirdness 1: half the resort strip was closed. Gift shops, tourist trappy places (like haunted houses and stuff like that), restaurants, and even a couple of hotels were shut down until the spring. I gather November is an off time for beaches, but I didn't expect these places to be closed completely (don't they have rents to pay either way?). It made for kind of a ghost town, though if you go a mile inland, all of a sudden everything is alive and functioning normally. In fact, the rest of Va. Beach/Norfolk (or at least the parts we saw) reminded me a lot of parts of Louisville. Weirdness 2: HUGE military presence. We accidentally turned into an army base while looking for an IHOP (damn you for your bad directions, TomTom!), and I believe there are also an Air Force base and a Navy base closeby. Since we, you know, saw a bunch of fighter planes flying around, and a few destroyers out on the ocean, I figured those were pretty safe bets. Weirdness 3: No swearing signs. Seriously, all over Atlantic Avenue, every block or so, they have these no swearing allowed signs. I googled them later and found that they used to have a law on the books that if you were caught swearing, you were subject to a $250 fine. Not surprisingly, somebody challenged the constitutionality of that law, and it was struck down. Weirdly puritanical. We cussed every time we saw one of those signs.
Ok, cutting this short (well, not short, but ending before I was gonna) because the baby is finally awake! Wish me luck with his pediatrician today. :)
