baby legs

Here's a shot of Elias in his crib earlier today, checking out his new mobile and sporting his new BabyLegs.


Neal had a thing for BabyLegs early on but I wasn't convinced until I realized our particular baby doesn't care much for pants and considering how tight some of the pants' waistbands are around his tummy, a very sensitive tummy that has a hard time keeping food down these days. So the BabyLegs seemed like a good solution, especially on a cooler than usual day like today.

The mobile we bought to entertain Elias as he effortlessly falls asleep in his big, beautiful crib. Ha! He likes the mobile, don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure it'll ever lull him to sleep (nor do I expect him to be able to fall asleep on his own just yet, but more on that in just a sec). I've successfully distracted him from fussing by plopping him down to enjoy the show and he seems very entertained by the plush animals and other high-contrast elements, all accompanied by three varieties of classical music. But fall asleep he did not. I did manage to get him to take a 45-minute or so nap in the crib earlier today, after swaddling and pacifying him, and turning on the HoMedic Soundspa. He seemed fairly disoriented and upset when he woke up, though. Needless to say, he's back in the bassinet for the current nap.

On the topic of sleep, schedules and routines were a big topic of discussion throughout the duration of my mom's group, something I wasn't expecting for a group geared toward babies anywhere from 2 to ten weeks old. Most things I hear and read advise against putting your baby on any kind of schedule (other than feeding "on demand") until they're at least 3 months old. That seems like common sense to me, especially if you're breastfeeding and considering they go through a couple of growth spurts in those first few months. The baby that seemed to be eating every three hours may suddenly be genuinely hungry every hour and a half for a day or two. I'm always surprised when people ask me, for example, when does Elias take his afternoon nap (I believe I was asked this question twice in Elias's first month of life). Well, sometimes he doesn't take an afternoon nap...other times he'll sleep from 2 until about 4 (which I suspect he's working on right now), or maybe he'll sneak in a shorter nap from 3:30 to 4:30. It depends on how his morning went, which is equally unpredictable. And that's just fine with me, for now at least.

But I couldn't help but be curious about the Babywise parenting philosophy that several women in the group swore by. The book is fairly controversial, I've since learned, thanks to hundreds of reviews on Amazon and this article on Salon. The author is not so much a medical professional, but rather a Christian evangelical minister, whose parenting philosophy goes a little like this: "Raising good children is not a matter of chance but a matter of rightly applying God's principles in parenting." Hmm. Don't get me wrong; I can appreciate the need for some return to order, even at 2 months along (and we're lucky to have a baby that has never woken up more than 2 or 3 times during the night), but I think I'll keep browsing the parenting titles.