Naptime

And he said he didn't need a nap...

First day with the "wall off." 

What adventures will this boy have while we are sleeping? 

Winter Hares

Self Portrait with Rabbit

Evening

sleep, baby, sleep

We've undergone a revolution: in the course of a week or two Sebastian had learned how to sleep. It's been a few weeks now, so I assume it's fair to breath that sigh of relief I didn't think would ever come. At first he would toss and turn in our bed when he joined us in the middle of the night, then he starting waking up every hour, half hour, tossing and turning. It was exhausting. Then, at bedtime he didn't need us anymore. He happily lay down in his crib and babbled or sometimes off-and-on cried to himself, but not for us, just out of tiredness. In fact it was better if we weren't in the room. We just put him down and he worked it out on his own. THEN an amazing (and kind of frightening thing happened). One three a.m I woke up with a start and realized the little dude hadn't woken up yet. I tiptoed to his room to make sure he was still alive and there he was, breathing peacefully, fast asleep. It was a strange night. I couldn't get back to sleep. I was so used to being up a few times a night, sleepily offering him milk, or sitting on his bedroom floor as he tossed and turned in his crib, looking up once and a while to make sure I was still there. I mentioned it to a friend of mine and she laughed and said, "Yah, what's even more amazing is when you sleep through the night for the first time."
The next night, he didn't wake up until five, had some milk, then went back to bed for a couple more hours. How far we've come... a month or two ago we were still rocking the thirty-pound brick to sleep while walking around because heaven forbid we should sit down. Then that didn't work anymore, and there was the screaming for an hour, reaching through the bars of his crib before a forty minute nap phase. That was fun. I guess looking back on the last couple months we've all been slowly adjusting to this change, Alex and I yearning for it but not expecting it anytime soon, and Sebastian slowly evolving.
I'm proud of all of us. I also think it's funny that we assumed Sebastian would co-sleep with us for years to come and that we were more or less okay with that, but that Sebastian decided he wanted his own bed. A part of me is a little sad to see that phase go, but a kid's gotta do... Alex and I didn't want to leave him to cry for hours to learn to sleep better, and we didn't. We sacrificed a lot and employed a great deal of patience for a gentle transition and Sebastian adjusted way quicker than we even imagined. I know a lot of parents would be shocked at a ten month old just learning to sleep on his own, and that some babies sleep through the night after their first few weeks. Well, good for them.

May nine.

I have a writers block tonight, combined with that dreadful feeling of having read over several stories I thought weren’t half bad only to discover they are, in fact, quite bad. So I thought I could at least blabber on here for a while.
Alex, Sebastian and I are now happily in our new home. It’s so lovely. I can’t get enough of it. The constant reminder that I am home on the West Coast is magnified by the huge windows of ocean, mountain, beach, cedars. Tonight at dusk I walked down to the beach and sat in the Squamish First Nations land, which is a long stretch through the forested coastline of creepily abandoned houses. They’re planning some sort of development for this area but for now it’s a long row of boarded-up beach houses. People must have just up and left their homes, all at once, because there are still chairs on the decks, kids toys scattered about, damp mattresses. Apparently there is still food in some of the cupboards, in the fridges, mould everywhere.
Shipping six hundred pounds across the county paid off. We don’t have a car here, are fairly isolated from main amenities and the two thrift stores are pretty unreliable for practical items, so it was nice to open boxes and find things we needed. Packing and unpacking, carrying box after box from car to house always makes me want to purge more. We’d been living out of backpacks for the last two months and when I discover several boxes of clothes I had literally forgotten existed it’s easy to question whether or not I actually need them. The answer is no, by the way.
I’ve been reconnecting with some old friends and enjoying some solo time here and there. I went to Vancouver alone the other day. I’ve never been apart from Sebastian for more that like four hours, so I decided it would be nice to take that old methodical trip into the city and see some friends. The month of May is full of visitors. In a few days Aja is coming over which I’m so looking forward to.
Sebastian is changing a lot. He doesn’t seem like a baby anymore. He likes to play and make us laugh. He wants to be carried around a lot, wants to see the world from our level, wants to explore the house alone sometimes. He’s not consistent in a lot of ways, more demanding. Grocery shopping with him, for example, is risky; sometimes he mutinies.
He’s also shifting into putting himself to sleep, much to our excitement and also exhaustion. He is figuring out how to sleep on his stomach without crawling. Last night he crawled then flopped around in his crib alone for a long time and then… silence. It was amazing. He’d managed to entirely put himself to sleep. But in the night when he wakes up and joins us in our bed we have to deal with a restless kid. Sometimes he sleeps horizontally, stretching us to opposite sides of the bed, testing our patience. We don’t have a go-to thing to help him sleep anymore. Milk doesn’t often help, swaddling definitely doesn’t help. Songs are the best we’ve got, but basically he is all he’s got and it’s been a long-time adjustment for him. I am exhausted, and so it Alex. Sometimes Sebastian wakes me up every ten minutes, sometimes I’m awake with him for an hour or more in the night, just patiently waiting for him to find a comfortable position, or trying to soothe his frustrated screaming. Man oh man. I’m finding my memory loss is out of control, as is my unabashed lust for coffee. But I know we’re on the brink of something, just stretching over this little phase, and with that in mind it’s easier to endure

I've been having a lot of dreams lately. Strange, half-significant dreams, one after the other after the other after the other. There are themes running through them, too. The other night I had two dreams about holes, like in one I expected to stand in essentially a grave filled with straw while a horse towered over me, and in another I was crawling out of a hole in a hatch in the ground and I was covered in white sugar. Strange. I just packed all my books in a box and taped it up, otherwise I would dig out my dream decoder. I'm sure Freud would have something to say about it.
These last couple days we've been having people in and out of our apartment as we try to rent it. This weekend we're having a kind of open-house garage sale on Sunday so there will be even more people coming in and out, browsing through our stuff. It feels kind of gross. Strangers opening your closets, twisting your shower knobs, peering out your windows. So far no one has jumped at the chance to take the place which makes it worse. One woman refused to take her boots off so stood in our hallway on two sheets of paper dripping icy dirt and I wanted to be like, "Get the hell out of our house!"
Anyhow, I suppose the end is near.
Sebastian has been having a hard time sleeping these days. He wakes up a lot. There was a time when once he was down, he was down and would often sleep for ten straight hours. But now he wakes up at all hours, whining and yelling in his sleep, eyes closed. What wakes him up? How can I teach him to help himself? He is going through a lot of changes right now and because of that I am infinitely patient most of the time. Watching him struggle to worm around the tiles, learning to crawl, knowing his teeth are coming in, seeing how his mind is far surpassing his physical abilities these days is hard. I watch him watching older babies, toddlers, kids and know he understands something his body doesn't yet. No wonder he can't sleep properly! But at the same time, isn't he exhausted?!
There are also a lot of changes in our life, such as all these people coming in and out at his bedtime, nap time. Such as the last couple months, so much travel, so much socializing. I really feel like hibernating for a while, if not for my sake for his. It will be a couple more months until we can settle in somewhere, have a quiet bedtime, have quiet days, have a more baby-centered existence which I think he would benefit from. By then he will be so old! Sometimes I wonder about the habits he will develop in the meantime. I want him to have a positive relationship to sleep, to be relaxed and rested when he wakes up, to feel safe, such as when he is tired he has the opportunity to crash without people keeping him awake, at least until he learns what restful sleep is again.