Baby Gabe

Now that Baby Gabe is more mobile, if he wants to find one of us, he just goes crawling from room to room.  He’s also normally fine with sitting in his play area with his toys.  When we hear music, chimes, or banging, we know he’s doing just fine.  When we don’t hear anything, we know he’s up to something.  The telltale sign that he’s gotten to a plant is when we hear the normal pitter patter of his hands smacking on the floor as he’s crawling followed by a short pause (he’s probably calculating whether he can get to the plant before we get to him) followed by a frenzied pitter patter as he makes a mad dash to his target.  In sprinting parlance, he’s what you’d call a good closer.  Once he’s in the home stretch, he picks up his pace dramatically to burst across the finish line.

It seems like all books on infant development assume that by nine months, an infant is sleeping through the night.  At four to five months, parents are supposed to move the baby into his own room and force him to get to sleep on his own.  It’s called “Ferberizing” after the doctor who advocated it.  Basically, parents put a baby into the crib drowsy but still awake.  Once you put him down, you don’t pick him up.  You check on him every 10 – 20 minutes, rubbing his back or holding his hand to calm him down, but you let him cry.  Eventually, he’ll get so tired that he has no choice but to fall asleep.  This process normally takes a week or two, but after that, the baby should sleep 9 – 12 hours without parents having to wake up to soothe him.  

We’ve never tried this method, partly because we think Baby Gabe is so persistent in everything he does that he’ll just keep crying all night and partly because we figure it’s our job to make sure we’re there when he needs us.  He always cries for a reason — hunger, diaper, temperature, hives, etc.  Once we figure out what he needs, he usually quickly drifts off to sleep.  We have friends, though, who swear by it.  Of course, when we’re bouncing him back to sleep at 3 AM, the Ferber method does sound enticing.  In the end, we figure all babies are different.  Some are great sleepers, and others aren’t.  Baby Gabe isn’t.  It’s a small price to pay.  His Uncle Jeff came for a visit and said, “You either take a lot of pictures, or he’s just a really happy baby.”  At the end of the week, he concluded Baby Gabe was just a really happy baby.

Baby Gabe’s A-gong, A-ma, and A-gu visited us for the holidays, and Baby Gabe couldn’t have been happier.