Another day down, another night awaits

It's 10:24. We refined the procedure a bit tonight. Since it seems that Robby just needs to scream for an hour or so before he can sleep at night, we let him have a head start a little early, hoping that by the time he went down, he'd have worn himself out a bit. We're already ahead of our 5 minutes from last night...been about 7 so far. As for me, I'm still expecting my first shift to be a busy one, but again we've learned enough now to know that when Robby does the banshee wail, there's not anything serious to worry about. It's just a question now of mentally steeling yourself for the onslaught of screaming.

The days are going pretty well. Robby still seems a bit yellow, we're expecting him to at least need to get blood drawn tomorrow at the doctor's appointment. We've for the moment stopped worrying about Hannah being so sleepy all the time. Her color looks better than his, but we just think that since she's smaller than he is, she doesn't have as much energy to throw around. Steph managed some good awake time with her this afternoon, which was nice for everyone.

Everything we do has to be planned out and strategized. If I want to so much as go downstairs, it becomes quite a complicated process of figuring out how to arrange all the remainder of the people in the house. Tomorrow we're all getting in the car together for the first time. Should be a blast.

The other main point to make is that I've reached the functional balance of new parent adrenaline and sleep deprivation, which means that I function pretty well as long as I just keep moving. If I stop and sit on the couch for more than 1 minute, I start to drift off rather aggressively.

10:34. Still waiting for the first cries. I know they're coming. I wait. I wait...

Current theories

When Mari was going through her difficult sleep period, Steph and I had a running gag going of introducing new ideas with "Theory number 38" or some other number, when we thought we had figured out why Mari didn't sleep as well as Faith had. In that spirit, I am going to start posting our current theories on why Robby and Hannah are having trouble sleeping...should be entertaining one day to go back and look through these and see how wrong we were. But anyway, here are the current thoughts:

*Hannah sleeps better than Robby.
*Both kids have crazy gas problems which at least contribute to the inability to fall and stay asleep.
*Hunger is generally NOT a major issue.
*Robby is pretty needy - he needs to be held, and he needs to be sucking on something just about every second.
*Both kids like to sleep on their sides, facing each other, preferably with Robby turned to his left and Hannah to her right.
*They both have already thwarted our ineffectual swaddling efforts.

Time passes

Steph is sleeping well, so I'm extending my own shift a little bit. It's now almost 1am, and I've only had to go in there once in the past hour or so. Cool thing happened - I literally fell asleep standing up. One second I'm starting at them in the crib, trying to decide if it's safe to walk out on our loud creaky hardwood floors, and the next second, I awake to feel myself falling. My foot shoots out to keep me upright, and luckily the loud thud goes unnoticed. Nice adrenaline rush, though. Oh, and about 5 seconds later my son lets out a huge fart in his sleep. I'm so proud.

Both our kids are gassy, seriously. Robby let out a belch on Saturday that would have made a frat boy blush.

One more thing - managed to crush the tips of my middle 3 fingers inbetween panels of the garage door tonight. It kinda hurts...

Matt