It's a Friday-before-Labor Day Miracle!

Oh, people! What I had feared would never come to pass, has finally become reality. Baby E slept 7.5 hours straight last night!! And, as the icing on that fabulous cake, he even did it in his own bed!! Now, I believe this is likely a fluke and probably won't happen again til he's, oh, I don't know, 12. BUT, I'll take it for now.

Interestingly, it's like Baby E read THIS post and decided to get on board with the plan. I started putting him in his bed after nursing him at night. Sometimes he falls asleep while nursing, and if that happens, I just hold him til I know he's "out" (i.e. lets his arm drop when I pick it up, you know, dead to the world kind of sleep) and then I lay him down. And, yes that may not be helping in the overall plan, but if he wakes up, then he's UP. Like for an hour or two. So, I gotta do what I gotta do.

So, if he doesn't fall asleep nursing, I rock him for a few minutes, to see if he'll settle down and fall asleep. If he does, see above. If not, I put him in his bed and lay down on the floor. And wait. And give him the paci he likes to throw out of the crib. And wait. Then pat his butt. And tell him to lay down. And wait. Then give him the paci again. And wait. You get the picture.

Last night I fell asleep before he did. And I woke up, and he was still awake. And it had been more than an hour and I was losing patience. So I went and got hubby, who was still up for some reason at 10:45pm (hey - that's super late at our house), and - it seems - got baby E to sleep. At some point during the night I heard him grunting and whining a little, but I didn't get up and assumed hubby did. Apparently not, which I learned when hubby woke me up at 6:15 this morning and said baby E was still asleep in his crib. After each asking the other whether we'd gotten him last night, we realized he'd slept all night (which ended up being from 11pm-6:30am).

So here's some irony for you. I'm more tired today than I have been recently. It's like my body got 7 hours of sleep and all of the sudden realized it hasn't been getting sleep and was reminded of how tired it is. So I'm going to take a nap right now. I should clean my disaster of a house. But a nap seems so much nicer.

Today's lesson - apparently baby E can read and is willing to cooperate with my plans to get him to finally sleep at night. That or he was just developmentally ready. Or I got lucky. Sometimes we all have those moments when it doesn't so much matter how the good thing happened, whether we had anything to do with it or not. What matters is that it happened. And that we take a moment to appreciate that it did.