Like father like son

Recently Jaeminkins has learnt how to roll over from his back to his tummy as I have been finding him in his cot awake and struggling to get up from his tummy. Found it a little alarming at first to find him lying on his front as there's so much literature about putting babies to sleep on their backs to prevent SIDS. But I've been getting a lot of reassurance from the playgroup mums, midwives, and the older generation mums to tell me that it's okay. But like father like son, they both like to sleep on their side and tummies=)

Its been a trying time as we've had to stop wrapping him as he's learnt how to roll and so its fidget central when we've put him down to sleep. Since the start of February, I find that Jaeminkins has somehow rotated himself 90 degrees to 180 degrees and at first I thought I was slowly losing my mind. But by just watching him, he uses his surroundings to push off and slowly rotate, babies are such clever little beings.

I know I was anti-dummy before but that's before I discovered that it works. So at four and a half months I've put him on a dummy to go to sleep and it has worked wonders.

We've also been trialling the 'cry it out' process, in other words, put the baby in his bed, shut the door, and let him bawl.

Dr Richard Ferber, author of Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems states after about a week of unheeded crying, a baby will learn to fall asleep on his own. Without a rewarding response to his cries, the theory goes, a baby learns that it's not worth the trouble to cry so hard.

Pepe gets really cut up when he hears Jaeminkins crying his heart out so it hasn't been an easy process.

On Tuesday night, Jaeminkins cried solidly for 50mins and we'd go in and check on him at 6mins, then 15mins then 20mins and then just let him go. He eventually flipped onto his tummy and sobbed himself into the mattress, so when he eventually went down you could hear these little sobs in his sleep.

Heartbreaking to hear but as I've been reading, most parents give in just before the child falls asleep so we were toughing it out and were rewarded with a sleeping baby.

Putting him down again on Wednesday night, Jaeminkins only took 20minutes to cry and fall asleep. So I think its just a matter of routine and he'll associate being put in his cot at night as sleepy time.

Jaeminkins has an interesting crawl at the moment, he face plants, lifts his knee and bum up in the air and pushes forward. Cracks me up every time he does it but is that how all babies learn to crawl??