Carson's Eating & Sleeping Habits and Miles' New Hobby

I thought I would update on how Carson is doing with his eating and sleeping. These are the kinds of things I love to look back on. We started feeding him rice a little over a month ago. At first, we put 2 Tbsp. in his bottle b/c he wasn't ready for a spoon. We just gave it to him at night and it seemed to help him sleep through the night.

Then, about 3 weeks ago, we started feeding him 4 Tbsp. with a spoon in the morning and at night. He's already up to 7-8oz. of milk at every feeding, so rice was the next logical step. He really liked it as long as we fed him fast enough. He's a big eater just like Miles always has been. After a couple of weeks, he started waking up at night. Darrin thought it might be the rice so he stopped giving it to him. He also became a little constipated which had never been an issue. It's been a couple days without rice and he's back to normal. I'm not sure if he can't tolerate the rice, if it's too early to introduce it, or if we were giving him too much and it was just too heavy on his stomach. I lean towards it being too heavy on his stomach, but for now, we will continue to do without. When we think he's ready to try again, we will try oatmeal cereal. In just a month, he'll be ready to start food anyway.

He's been sleeping really well. He has his last feeding between 9:30-10pm and goes straight to sleep without any trouble. He either sleeps until 6ish or he starts crying around 4am. If he cries at 4am, all we have to do is re-position him on his left side and he goes right back to sleep almost every time. On the rare occasion that he decides to act like the infant that he is, we just put him in our bed and he goes right back to sleep until we wake him up. He drinks so much and sleeps so long that we've been having a problem with his diapers leaking at night. We've tried a bigger size to no avail. This morning, I woke him up, turned on the light, changed his diaper, completely dressed him for daycare, and even though he was wide awake, kicking and playing, he still went back to sleep in our bed until it was time for everyone to get up. Miles got in our bed during the night too, so it was  real party in there.

For as well as he sleeps at night, he's still a cat napper during the day. At daycare, he takes naps in his crib, usually 45 minutes to an hour between each feeding.

We are able to extend nap time at home to around 2 hours between feeding b/c of the rock and play. Without that, we would be just like daycare. He likes to be in the rock and play in the middle of the living room. If we ever move him to his dark, quiet room he will not sleep long at all.

He's definitely not on the tight schedule that Miles was on, but he's just a different baby. We might have been able to force it a little more than we have, but we opted not to push it. It's hard to sleep train to rigidly when he's at daycare so much during the week. I'm satisfied with how well he's eating and sleeping so far.

Now, onto the big kid. Miles has a new favorite hobby...word searches. This is how he spends his 15 minutes of reading time every night. I really wish he was still reading, but I know this phase will pass. I don't want to push reading too hard and turn him against it.

He keeps a word search book & pen in my car and Darrin's car. He does it every morning on the way to school.

After looking at all these pictures of sleeping kids, I'm ready for bed. Here's hoping Carson sleeps all night and Miles doesn't decide to join us sometime during the night!