Year: 2008

When we asked Conrad’s doctor when we should start introducing solid foods, she said he would be ready when he not only showed interest in the food we were eating, but seemed to get frustrated or even angry when we didn’t give him some. I assume that doesn’t apply to beer. Nothing sends the wrong message about your parenting skills like having a shirtless infant staggering around demanding booze.

More thoughts on the sleeping-through-the-night question: Over the past four months, I’ve had people tell me, “Oh, when he gets to ten pounds, then he’ll start sleeping through the night.” Ten pounds came and went. Someone else told me 11. Then yet someone else said 12. A fourth person told me 13. Well, for Conrad the magic number appears to be 16 pounds. He slept through the night again last night, from 7:30 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.

So, if you’re a parent of a new baby wondering when he or she will start sleeping through the night:

I have no idea. Good luck!

We just got back from Conrad’s four month checkup. After watching him stand, jump up and down and yank on her stethoscope, his doctor allowed that he might be “a bit advanced in motor development.”

Check.

We also learned he’s in the 50th percentile for head size, 50 to 75th for weight and 75th to 90th for height. So, he’s going to be tall and skinny with a little bitty head. Awesome! He can work the carnival circuit!

And we learned he’s 16 pounds 4 ounces. They measured him too, but for some reason those numbers never stick in my head. Twenty six inches maybe?

I told the nurse I was 70 inches and she told me I was a big boy now.

Where’s my cake?

Since he was, oh, maybe, three days old, people have been asking us, “Is he sleeping through the night yet?” We didn’t know anything, so we felt like he should have been and that we were unlucky and that all newborns slept 12 hours in blissful silence.

Since then we’ve heard from enough other parents and read enough books to know that our response should have been, “No, of course he’s not sleeping through the @#$*& night yet. Shut up, get out and don’t come back without a casserole.” We’ve also learned that it’s a relative term. For at least a month he’s slept for 10 hours or so, only waking once to feed. We learned that made us very lucky.

Well last night, in celebration of his four month birthday, he did, in fact, with no ambiguity…

“cue the celestial choir”

… sleep through the night. He went to sleep at 7:30 p.m., blarked and werfled a bit at 5:00 a.m. but then fell back asleep until 5:45, when he awoke with his characteristic big morning smile.

And there was much rejoicing, none more than by the Mommy, who does not do quite as well as the Daddy when it comes to sleep deprivation.

Of course, who knows what he’ll do tonight.

Go to the Flickr page. We’ve uploaded a backlog of at least two weeks of photos, including photos from our trip to Topsail Beach with Becky and Dave and Evan and Levi “although there’s nothing to indicate we were at the beach”, a veritable cornucopia of facial expressions and some biting.