Parenting

Hubs and I have a strange position as parents.  Our little boy has special needs.  He requires more time and attention than most babies.  At 11 months old he is not mobile.  He can roll back to tummy and tummy to back, however, he cannot combine them and roll to get somewhere.  He is just starting to push up on all fours, but that is also dependent on when his last dose of medicine is.

He has an extensor reflex, this develops if something goes wrong in the brain. Until he overcomes this he will not be able to sit unsupported or walk.  We have therapy once a week now, it just recently increased.  He is in Occupational and Physical Therapy.  We are on the waiting list for a Speech Evaluation.

Bear is just starting to develop a pincer grasp, however has a feeding aversion.  To feed purees it is a dance of holding some sort of loud, obnoxious toy and getting him 100% distracted while sticking the spoon in his mouth.  I have gotten him to happily eat a 6oz jar of baby food like this.  Normally, he seals his mouth shut.

I honestly can't say I picked one style of parenting, but I do meld mostly with Attachment Parenting.  My little guy needs so much and the only way we have of communicating is for me to listen to his cues.  We attempted sleep training at almost 6 months old because the Neurologist said his awful sleep is because we didn't allow him to cry.  It was unsuccessful.

Bear was/is a screamer.  He screamed bloody murder for at least 18 hours a day for 5 months.  It finally started to improve and he screamed about 8 hours a day until 7 months when it finally subsided.  He is still a very demanding child and easily frustrated.  On top of all this we dealt with little sleeping.  For two months old to 5 months he was up screaming every 30 minutes. Hubs and I slept in shifts, literally.  We were walking zombies.  We finally demanded the doctors help us and they prescribed medicine with the warning that it wouldn't work.

Boy did it work.  We have a different child.  He is "delightful" (the words of all the doctors), he has such a great smile and laugh, and he sleeps.  Lately we had been dealing with sleep that was worsening, and we tried a new medicine.  This one was guaranteed to work. It didn't.

I have heard the "you need to let him cry" mantra way too many times and was almost tempted.  However, I feel it's very important not to force Bear into a schedule.  He is a baby, a human, with his own quirks and special needs.  He is not defined by a clock, or a book that touts a schedule.  I try to listen to what he needs.

He is actually on a very strict schedule, that is predicted by him.  After he wakes, he immediately gets a diaper change and medicine followed by calm playtime on the floor to let it settle in his tummy.  30 min to 1 hour later, depending on his hunger level he gets his bottle.  45 minutes later we try food.  He goes down for a nap 4-5 hours after his wake time. His nap length is the only part of his schedule I predict.  Because of having 3 doses of his medicine a day (one is right before nap time and it does make him drowsy for a little while) he could sleep for HOURS.  And then be up all night.  I do wake him up at the 2.5 hour mark usually and he wakes up easily. 

When his sleep started worsening I decided to brave the even worse sleep exhaustion and pay attention to what he was saying.  Thank goodness for video monitors.  I watched him wake up and start almost panicking that he was swaddled.  We tried one arm out and it didn't work.  He didn't seem interested in the bottle.  He would go down quickly, however as soon as he started drifting into a lighter sleep state he would wake up panicking that he was constricted.

I talked to Hubs and we decided he needed to be unswaddled.