Nine Months

Avi Ohr will be nine months old in a couple of days. The weather has been really hot and he sweats a lot. I feed him water sometimes from a bottle but breastfeeding is probably still the better option. Anyway, he still really loves it. We're in a routine now, though it's definitely not an optimal one. I nurse him in the morning when he wakes up and then I feed him breakfast a little while later. After that, he plays for a while and then signals to me that he's tired and he wants to go to sleep. Signaling, by the way, doesn't mean holding up a handmade sign. It means being irratable and sometimes, if I've missed that sign, he just nods off in the middle of the living room floor. Most of the time, however, naps are when we snuggle up and have another feed. That's how he drifts off to sleep. Sometimes he sleeps for twenty minutes, and sometimes for three hours. Mostly it's somewhere in between. The rest of the day is more or less a variation of the same cycle: eat, play, sleep. I try to put himto bed at around 9:30 but sometimes he gets tired a little earlier and sometimes a little later.
Then comes the night-time. For a few months, he was sleeping through the night. But for a couple of months now we've been on this cycle where he sleeps until midnight or one and then wakes up and wants to be held. The easiest thing for sleepy me to do is just feed him until he falls asleep again and then put him back in bed. Then he wakes up agian around 4. Again, I take him out of bed and feed him, only this time I often fall asleep before I get around to putting him back in the crib. So he is used to waking up in bed with us.