I want to break free

I'm seriously slacking on my baby blogging. Today was better but Elias continues to fight naps and has been taking a little longer than usual to fall asleep at night. His napping ways have never been great; I think I can pretty easily count on one hand the number of days he's taken two good naps in one day during his entire 9+ months. He almost always seems to wake up from at least one nap still a little sleepy. But I can usually count on one solid one and a half to two hour nap, typically in the morning. That nap became a struggle right around the time we began to wean Elias from his reflux meds. I think the last time I posted an update from the spit-up factory he was still spitting up a fair amount. In short, around the 7-month mark, we experienced dramatic improvement. He rarely spits up at all. So at our last appointment with the GI doc, we got the green light to begin our exit strategy, weaning him off of half his meds after another couple of weeks of little to no spit up. We put the process off when he came down with that nasty stomach bug, but about four weeks ago, started giving him half what he'd been getting before. I'm not sure if the lack of napping is coincidence or if it is indeed related. There are other things we can blame it on, like teething and general developmental stuff (according to Wonder Weeks, he stopped napping right around week 37, the world of categories), so we've been hesitant to put him back on the full dose. Every day I choose the wait and see approach because I'm so eager for him to be prescription medication free. We'll see how this week goes...

Along with napping, Elias has been really inconsistent with his solid feedings. He's taking his bottles just fine and while we were well on our way to three squares, these past few weeks I'm lucky to get one good feeding in, plus a snack or two. At 22+ pounds the boy is clearly not malnourished, but it's frustrating nonetheless. He's far more interested in playing, exploring, and this little spoon trick Neal is encouraging him to practice in this video:



One of the things that frustrates me most about parenthood so far is how inconsistent babies are. I just don't understand why something that was going so smoothly for a couple of months - like sleeping or eating - suddenly becomes challenging again. On a positive note, though, while he still prefers smoothly pureed food to chunkier blends, he can finally feed himself a handful of Cheerios without gagging.

Meanwhile, I've been trying really hard to launch a project I've been working on in one way or another for over four years. Things I could have accomplished in a weekend pre-baby now take weeks. Not that I'm complaining, but the balance we seemed to be striking for much of 2009 so far has definitely been off over the past few weeks. I feel like I'm beginning to, on the one hand, catch up a bit, and on the other hand, let go of the expectation that, for example, said project will be done by the end of this weekend.