The Left Hand

Oh my the schedule change! It makes me exhausted just thinking those words. Saturday morning I started Aiden on his new schedule, which consisted of one less feeding during the day (but more milk at each feed) and going to bed an hour earlier.

How is it going, you ask? Eh.

Saturday and Sunday were a little rough when it came to nap time. He took longer to go down and got up early each time. He got progressively more cranky by the day's end. I think that his build up of no sleep made it harder for him to go down. Things went much worse for him yesterday at school. He slept a total of 1 hour all day, which is definitely not enough.

We are sticking with it though! Aiden is doing much better on this schedule change than he did on the last one I tried. The teachers at his daycare seem fine going ahead with it at school, so we'll just play it out and see what happens.

The downfall of this schedule is he goes to sleep earlier. That means we get less Aiden-time at night. But it also means we have more time to get stuff done around the house in the evening. So far I miss that little guy more than I enjoy getting housework done. Imagine that.

Part of the hope with putting him down earlier for the night was he would sleep later. I can see a little improvement in this department. He is sleeping a little later each morning. Today he got up at 4:30 and 5:30am. The problem is that he was really tired by the time I dropped him off at school. I hope he manages to stay awake until his first nap time. Jeesh, we'll see.

I have found out recently that loud machine noises scare Aiden. He's not afraid of the lawn mower, weed eater or vacuum. But he is terrified of the blender, the hand dryer in public restrooms (I'm sort of afraid of those too) and occasionally Travis' sneezes.

I was trying to change his diaper in a restaurant this weekend when someone turned on the hand dryer. Oh my goodness the sadness that ensued!! Aiden stopped kicking his legs, scrunched up his eyebrows, looked directly at me and SCREAMED. I can't even call it crying because that was a high-pitched scared-as-hell scream. I was covering his ears and kissing his forehead when someone did it AGAIN!! I almost tore out of that handicap stall and cursed out some lady for drying her hands! But then I didn't. Only because it would have left Aiden unattended on a diaper changing station, of course.

A few weeks ago I somehow managed to break Aiden of the swaddling. He doesn't go to sleep as easily as he did when he was swaddled, but he IS sleeping. Which is good. One day I just started doing a loose swaddle. My hopes were that he could stay covered up without a blanket coming up over his face and suffocating him, but still be able to move his arms. It seems to work okay.

By freeing his arms, we have exposed him to his hand-with-a-mind-of-its-own. This is the one that used to whack him in the face during nap time and wake him back up (hence the swaddling). Now when I put him down for a nap, his left hand immediately shoots out of the blanket and above his head. After a moment, it works it's way down to his face and pulls that pacifier right out of Aiden's mouth. And boy does he get mad! If I'm there when it happens, he looks at me with these super sad eyes, like "why are you doing this to me?" AHH! I'm not doing it! It's your left hand!!" The crazy thing is that the Left Hand will occasionally put the pacifier back in his mouth. BUT HE WON'T LET GO. It's just a tease. You know, "here you go, oh wait, just joking!"

Poor Aiden. Such a rough life.