Musical Beds

My eyes are red and bloodshot. No, I have not been smoking pot. No, I'm not getting ready for Valentine's Day. It's the lack of sleep. My baby boy is 5 months old and still sleeps like a 1 month old. I'm guessing that the exclusive breastfeeding (got over the strike) has something to do with it, but I just find that heating up a bottle in the middle of the night to be highly annoying (plus he doesn't like formula). It's so much easier to pull my bodily appendage out and go back to sleep. This leads me of course to the crime that is being committed at my house on a nightly basis. The crime I swore I would never commit.

I'm pulling a Mejia (co-sleeping)....actually, it's more like musical beds. The only thing missing is the music. Let me s'plain. At 8 or 9 my boy eats. He falls asleep. I put him in his crib. At 1am-ish he wakes up because he wants to eat. No amount of soothing will get him to go back to sleep. I take him out of his crib and feed him. If I'm still awake, I put him back, if not, we fall asleep in bed (usually the case). Around 4, he's up again to eat. If he's there with me, I feed him, if he's in the crib, I go get him and bring him back to the bed to feed him. If I'm awake after this I put him back, otherwise he stays there with me. Sometimes CMan wakes up in the middle of the night and decides that he too wants to be in the bed. He comes to my bed, R moves to CMan's bed (we don't all fit in the bed at the same time). CMan sleeps like a maniac, so then JJ has to be moved to the crib because I fear that he will get whacked in the head by CMan. It's a crazy musical beds procedure every night and it's driving me crazy. My eyes are bloodshot and I am soooo tired, but I can't figure out how to make him sleep MORE! I fear that he is getting used to my bed and I DO NOT WANT THAT! But hello, I have to sleep....I don't know what to do. And please don't say "just give him formula"...I'm sure there are other breastfed babies out there that sleep through the night. He's too young to cry it out and I don't really want to do that because then CMan is going to wake up...Ahjrgh!

Another problem I think is that he only eats for about 5 minutes on one side and then he falls asleep. I change his diaper, I burp him and still he continues to sleep. Sometimes I get him to eat on the other side too for about 1 min or two, but not always. So, of course, after 3 hours he's hungry again! This 5 minute eating deal is usually how he eats all the time though, so even during the day he eats every 3 to 4 hours when I'm with him on the weekends. He's still taking the Prevacid for the reflux, so he only throws up once in a while now.

He has started eating baby foods, but he doesn't really like them and makes yucky faces and spits it back out. Sometimes he cries hysterically and won't eat it (when he's too hungry). He did this with the baby cereal, so we skipped that altogether. Who knew this would be so hard the second time around?

Ambien...take me away.