james, the baby whisperer

seriously.
i'm about to hire him out if you're interested.

when i had to go back to school for a month to finish out the year, i was slightly freaking out that it had started taking upwards of an hour to get covington to sleep at night. i was ok with the 3 and 6 o'clock feedings, but the 11:00 or 12:00 bedtime was not so great.

enter this little book.
mr. ronnie had given us a stack of research based books approved by the american pediatrics - quite important to james - and i had read this one a couple weeks after covington was born. side note - you shouldn't read anything that you actually want to remember a couple weeks after your baby is born. well, james got it out and started reading and decided to follow it to a T.

best part of this little book - she promises you can read the entire thing in 2 hours.
i think all parenting books should come with that promise.

there's a ton of books out there like this one and tons of different scheduling advice, but this worked for us. james had 2 weeks off between his semesters when i went back to school so, needless to say, that first week of schedule training wasn't exactly vacation for him :)

it was nothing magic, though we quickly figured out that james is way more patient in the middle of the night. i was all about 'give me the kid. i'll feed him and he'll go back to sleep so we can go back to sleep.' james was all about the 'you sleep, i'll gently console him and rub his back and wake you up when it's time to eat.' yep. he's amazing.

lucky for us, it didn't take to long for covington to get it. after 2 not-so-fun-nights, he stopped screaming for hours when we put him in his bed and at about 11 weeks, he was sleeping through the night. yep - i'm fully expecting for the rest of our kids to be horrible sleepers and pay me back for the fact that i didn't sleep through the night until i was 3. i'll enjoy it while i can.

naps are still not his favorite, but at least sleeping at night makes mornings like this way more fun.

oh be still be beating heart.

needless to say, i'm so thankful for the dad that james is.
i have a feeling it's only going to keep getting better.
happy father's day