Ben on a sleep schedule

....When we first brought Ben home, I remember looking at each other and down at this baby and thinking "OK....... What now??" -- and then as quickly as that thought entered my mind, we were making multiple daily trips to Target & Babies R Us, getting up countless times at night to feed Ben, putting the pediatrician on speed dial & going through more diapers than we ever thought possible in a day. We went through a period of such exhaustion that I literally would have a hard time making up sentences in English....or Portuguese for that matter. Several nights one of us would go into the bedroom with the promise that we'd "be right back" and never quite find our way back out of the bedroom (or out of our clothes!!!). I remember hitting the one month mark and people asking "Is he sleeping through the night yet?"...............nope. Not yet.

But, ah - that was so long ago!! Now we're pros! We're used to interrupted sleep and mixing salt or pepper with our morning coffee .... tag teaming our way through the nights as Benjamin teaches us that YES, even WE can function without sleep! But as we're hitting the 3-month mark, we're starting to flirt with the idea that we can have him on a sleeping schedule.

So, we're embarking on the sleep schedule stage of our journey. While our little bundle of joy has always been (brag time!) a G R E A T baby - happy, smiling, social babbler and drooler that he is - he's not so graceful when he gets tired or hungry. Let me explain the degree to which my boy falls from grace here ............. greatest smile, and giggles in one minute and back arching and howling screams the next. We then scurry to keep our delicate peace with our benign dictator - making sure he gets all the oz. he could ever fit into that never ending tummy of his.................usually 6 or so.

So some veteran parents turned us on to this book called "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" by Dr. Weissbluth. Of course, that would mean I have to read all 457 pages of it ........ which might be the secret behind this book - let's make Benjamin read the book and uh, fall asleep .... uh, fast.....after the first paragraph. Yeah ......... ummm, I think that's the main concept behind it. Of course, with the little experience I do have in parenting I can tell you that if you HAVE or FIND the time to read a book - there's something WRONG!!!! ..........so since they don't sell Cliff Notes for this, I skimmed through and got the jist of it. We'll have to put it to the test -- started today to not-so-great reviews by our most important critic but heck, the worst that could happen at this stage is that we won't get much sleep -- and since that's a way of life now, I'm OK with sticking to the plan and introducing Benjamin to the whole new world of a good night's (uninterrupted) sleep!