Sleeping Through the Night!!!

I'm really proud of our big one month old (as of today at 11:10 pm!) at the moment!  These past few nights I've been putting him down in his bassinet in the kitchen at 7:30 while I work in the living room on orders.  Most nights this week I would finish the orders sometime between 11 and midnight and go in and get him to take upstairs.  He would wake up because he was already dozing rather lightly by that point, and I would change him and feed him and take him upstairs.

Last night I finished up work a little after midnight and peeked my head in to look at him.  He was out cold.  And I was curious.  How long would he sleep if I didn't take him upstairs?

I grabbed a blanket and laid down on the couch and fell asleep with the lights on, waiting for the sound of stirring in the kitchen that would tell me that he was up and ready to eat.

At 2 am the alarm beeped as Paul walked through the door and came into the living room, surprised to find me still downstairs (our alarm beeps whenever a door opens and says something like "back door open" depending on what door a person is coming through).  And Patrick was still asleep.

That meant that he'd been asleep for more than six hours.  And five hours is technically what experts call: "sleeping through the night."  (Let us ignore, for the moment, the fact that an infant can wake up at 11 pm and have slept long enough to constitute this achievement.)

Paul changed him, which woke him up, and we took him upstairs where he ate and woke up one more time before seven when the alarm went off to wake us all up to get ready for swim lessons.

I think I'm going to have to get the baby monitor set up so he can sleep in the upstairs bassinet and I can see how long he'd actually sleep without being woken up to come upstairs when I'm done with work each night.  I'm wondering if the gradual increase in how much I've been able to work, waking him up a tiny bit later each night, has unintentionally (but fantastically!) sleep trained him.

Either way I'm pretty excited and surprisingly well rested for having a one month old!

Oh and here's another goal for today (a Mommy goal).  Today I will get my camera out and get pictures of Patrick.  I've realized why this baby hasn't been photographed and it has something to do with being the third born, although not in the way most people would think.  The thing is, Patrick is almost always in a wrap, being kept away from less than gentle, although quite loving, toddler hands.  And it's really hard to sit and snap cute pictures when the person you're photographing is strapped to your chest.  With Sadie I could arrange blankets and prop her up on her little vibrating chair and take 300 pictures to capture that cute moment when she yawned or made a face or smiled.  It's much harder to do that when the baby's cute little yawn is practically smushed against your collar bone (because smushing their face into your chest so that you have to make sure they're breathing and try to reposition them every five minutes is just how some babies insist on being held).  And that is my goal for Patrick's one month birthday... now the question is... will I succeed?  I may have to wait until after toddler bedtime to start snapping pictures of the cuteness...