I feel like I've been somewhat disingenuous in leaving the c.i.o. entry as the last communication on the topic for a few days. Not that I changed or exaggerated anything about that night; just that I'd hate to leave you all with the impression that since I let Blake cry for 10 minutes in the middle of the night, Blake has been reincarnated as an independent sleeper and all has been well in the Rocketfamily. The reality is quite different.

On Thursday (the day after c.i.o. night in Canada), Blake took a very short, very late nap in the car on the way home from Toronto. As a result, he was grumpy & difficult to settle that night, and we ended up popping him in his crib to grump about while we ate a plate of much-needed supper. He yelled in staccato bursts for awhile (less 'I am miserable' than 'Hey! Hey you guys!') and then fell asleep on his own. He then stayed asleep for 3 hours.

I won't lie to you. At the time I thought that we were entering a new and improved phase of Blake's sleep, a phase in which he would be angry but resigned and put hisownself to sleep each time he woke up. But last night all the premature hopes, all the highly-coloured fantasies, all the rationalisations came crashing down.

It started out as a fairly normal night: he went down around 7 and slept until 9:30. The Boy walked him down at this time and we were getting ready for bed when he started squawking after barely 20 minutes of sleep. I went in, fed him until he pulled off all milk-drunk, and went to bed myself. Two hours later he woke up, and in a spectacularly bad show of decision-making, I decided to let him cry. We moved to the next room & listened to him howl for an hour and a half before I broke down.

See, I violated my own cardinal rule: always feed the baby. I can let him cry with a clear conscience as long as I know he's not hungry. For despite the well-meaning advice of my doctor, I have no wish to night-wean my child. I know him well enough to see that he still needs the milk at night in order to grow, and I have no desire to push him off the growth charts completely. (We've already dropped to the 10th percentile over the last 4 months, a statistic that would worry me if he weren't so obviously brilliant and healthy.)

When I picked him up last night, he quieted down immediately (thus indicating that I had broken my second rule: if Blake stops crying in our arms, he does not need to cry it out alone in his crib.) I took him into the abandoned big bed and nursed him to sleep, making sure that I disengaged before falling asleep myself. And all was right with the world.

Blake can be a difficult child. He can scream with bestial, world-shattering fury for no apparent reason even when he is freshly fed and cradled in a parent's loving arms. He occasionally mistakes his night for day and crawls over the two of us like an off-roading dirt bike, happily babbling while his knee presses into my throat. He has shown himself unwilling to sleep for longer than 3 hours at a typical stretch, sticking his head periodically in the waking world like a prairie dog surveying the hillocks of home.

But if this is the worst of it, then I'm on a vast ocean of all right.

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 10/23/2004 08:45:00 p.m.