Wonder-filled, indeed!

Recently I was doing a little research online about the 4-month sleep regression that's so common for babies. Cole had been sleeping extremely well since about 2 months - we'd settled into a pattern where he went to bed around 7:30 and we woke him around 12 midnight to eat. And then he'd sleep again until about 6 am. It was awesome!

And then around 3 1/2 months, something seemed to change. I blamed myself at first (of course - Mom habit, eh?) because I'd gone to the Okanagan and mucked with that formula a little. He started waking up ALL NIGHT long. He wasn't fussy per se - Cole is an amazingly calm baby - but the pattern was different. He still went to bed easily at 7:30 but he would wake with little grunting noises and keep at it until we checked on him. I thought he must be hungry since he wasn't eating as well during the day (and LaLeche League's answer to everything is more boob) so I kept feeding him when he woke. Then we read that would create a bad habit, so we started just replacing his pacifier, and that put him right back to sleep in a second (I'm trying not to worry about that habit just yet!)...

When spending hours at night online trying to figure out a magical sleep solution (didn't find one), I stumbled across a reference to a book - The Wonder Weeks - that seemed to be describing what we were experiencing. The cover claims to tell you "how to turn your baby's 8 great fussy phases into magical leaps forward". Normally, I'm a little doubtful about claims like this. But honestly, this book is amazing! I think that might be the first time I've bolded text on this blog. It's that good!

It charts out the major milestones of baby's mental development over the first 14 months. Most books talk a lot about the physical milestones alone, but this shows how, behind the scenes, there is so much going on at a mental level before it shows up in things that you can see. Before a baby is able to do something physically, he has to understand large concepts that completely revolutionize how he sees his world.

For example, Cole is just 19 weeks now. He seems to suddenly be interested in and physically able to do many new things. He rolls over both ways, lifts up on his arms, tries to move, is interested in music and musical scales, watches us eat, loves tickling and anticipating the tickling, seems to understand certain phrases and songs, grabs at everything, sits up against us and so much more. This is actually Wonder Week 19 - when he has come to understand the world of events - "a short, familiar sequence of smooth transitions from one pattern to the next".

The book says that after the fussy period (usually a few weeks leading up to the acquisition of the new understanding) there will be an easy period when the baby enjoys experimenting with this new skill.

I can't recommend this book enough. It's written in a very positive, upbeat and fluent style and lends itself well to snippet-reading. That's great for me right now because I don't have time for hours of undisrupted tome-reading! I wasn't able to find it at Chapters online, but I did manage to snag a copy at the Vancouver Public Library. It's so good that I'm actually going to order one from Amazon.