volume control
3 March 2005 15:22It took us a month, but we finally caved and got out The Pacifier.
Corwin's at that awkward point where he no longer just eats and sleeps; he now has a considerable period after he eats where he wants to hang out and be entertained . . . except that he hasn't yet acquired a sense of humor (or, really, of play), and he seems somewhat frustrated by this.
As a result, for the last few days (and last night/today in particular), he's been generally dissatisfied. Not really in a big way--he reserves that for when he hasn't yet been fed--but enough so that we can't really sleep while he does this for a couple of hours starting at 2:30 AM. What's worse is that neither attention or cuddling, per se, seems to be enough; he wants variety. On top of this, he's not sleeping as long at a stretch as he had been.
Up to this point, we'd been giving him a finger to suck on in lieu of a pacifier; this worked particularly well when we were "finger-feeding" him (i.e., giving him a finger to suck on while squirting milk into his mouth via a syringe). However, a few days ago we moved over to the bottle (in part because our syringes are experiencing increasing levels of Technical Difficulties), and he seems to slowly be figuring out that fingers don't actually have milk in them; he'll still suck on one for a while, but not for long.
So we're trying him out on a pacifier. For me, it's hard not to think of this as some kind of failure; a Real Dad (TM), no doubt, would do without sleep as necessary in order to keep his child entertained (and never mind this pesky Ph.D. that I'm supposedly pursuing), and not resort to sticking a rubber plug in his kid's mouth in a bid to get a couple of hours of sleep. *sigh*
Corwin's at that awkward point where he no longer just eats and sleeps; he now has a considerable period after he eats where he wants to hang out and be entertained . . . except that he hasn't yet acquired a sense of humor (or, really, of play), and he seems somewhat frustrated by this.
As a result, for the last few days (and last night/today in particular), he's been generally dissatisfied. Not really in a big way--he reserves that for when he hasn't yet been fed--but enough so that we can't really sleep while he does this for a couple of hours starting at 2:30 AM. What's worse is that neither attention or cuddling, per se, seems to be enough; he wants variety. On top of this, he's not sleeping as long at a stretch as he had been.
Up to this point, we'd been giving him a finger to suck on in lieu of a pacifier; this worked particularly well when we were "finger-feeding" him (i.e., giving him a finger to suck on while squirting milk into his mouth via a syringe). However, a few days ago we moved over to the bottle (in part because our syringes are experiencing increasing levels of Technical Difficulties), and he seems to slowly be figuring out that fingers don't actually have milk in them; he'll still suck on one for a while, but not for long.
So we're trying him out on a pacifier. For me, it's hard not to think of this as some kind of failure; a Real Dad (TM), no doubt, would do without sleep as necessary in order to keep his child entertained (and never mind this pesky Ph.D. that I'm supposedly pursuing), and not resort to sticking a rubber plug in his kid's mouth in a bid to get a couple of hours of sleep. *sigh*