Finally . . . home at last! This has been a crazy week, and I’m so glad to be done with the traveling. Poor Micah has had it the roughest – I think he is all confused about the time zone. The past few nights, bedtime has been a bit of a disaster, which has been so frustrating. Since Micah was 8 weeks old, bedtime has been simple – we get ready for bed, we put Micah down, we run in once or twice to reinsert his paci, and he sleeps through the night.
Since Sunday night, however, Micah has been tired and exhausted. I’ve gotten him ready for bed while he smiles and coos, and I nurse him as he dozes off, and I go to put him to sleep . . . . at which point, he melts down. Shrieking, hollering, yelling, hysterics. For about an hour. The poor guy is just so over-tired, he can’t let himself go to sleep. Sunday night was tough, but the crying was minimal – he started to get upset, I made a “swing” out of my lap and swayed him back and forth until he fell asleep. It took close to 1 hour to get him to sleep, but it was relatively painless. Monday night, we were off to a great start. I tried putting him to sleep earlier, but once again, hysteria set in. This time, he was loud and sobbing. I tried the makeshift swing, but no joy. My mom tried rocking him, but no joy. We finally decided to try a food coma . . . I tried nursing him, but there was not much left, and it was not coming out fast enough for him, so we made him a bottle. He took about 1 ounce, and food coma finally took hold! After that, my mom was able to rock him and sing to him, and he drifted off to la-la land and slept through the night.
Tonight, my original plan was to give him his medicine on the plane, to nurse him while we waited for the bags, and then hope he fell asleep in the car on the way home and just put him straight to bed. Well . . . things did not quite work out as I had planned. We left for the airport a bit late, so I was about 1/2 hour late nursing him. That half hour proved to be critical – when we landed 10 minutes early and our bags were waiting for us as we came up to baggage claim, it was about 1/2 hour too early to nurse him again. We decided to head home and do the bedtime routine there. Elliot was picking us up . . . and it took him another 15 minutes to get to us. By the time we got home, Micah had hit over-tired again. We got him ready for bed, I nursed him . . . . and then the hysteria hit again. He screamed for 1 hour and 40 minutes. Elliot and I tag-teamed, singing, shaking, rocking. He would calm down, and then he would wake himself up and start screaming again. Around 9:30 I tried nursing him again while Elliot fixed up a bottle. By the time Elliot got upstairs with the bottle, Micah was sound asleep. Hopefully, he’ll sleep through the night, and tomorrow night will be better.