Updates X 2

First, the giveaway update: I'm thrilled that so many people are excited about the chocolate giveaway! And I'm loving the favorite holiday treats that everyone mentioned. Peanut brittle - yum! Peanut butter fudge - yum! Ribbon candy - yum! You still have time to enter. Just leave a comment on this post telling me your favorite holiday treat by 11:59 pm tomorrow night. Sydney will pick a winner on Thursday morning before school and I'll post the winner later that day. And you don't have to have a blog to enter, just an e-mail address. Also, if you don't like chocolate (which is hard to imagine because who in their right mind doesn't?), you can always give the tin to a neighbor as a holiday gift.

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Second, the CIO update: For those of you not familiar with the alphabet soup of parenting acronyms, CIO stands for the "Cry it Out" method of getting babies to sleep on their own. AP, or Attachment Parenting, parents think it's cruel and they may be right, but it works (at least for us). For proof, this is Evan's old nighttime schedule:

7:30 bedtime
10:00 cry, I feed him
12:00 cry, Ryan puts pacifier in
1:00 cry, Ryan puts pacifier in
2:00 cry, Ryan gives him a few ounces of formula
3:00 cry, Ryan puts pacifier in
4:00 cry, Ryan puts pacifier in
5:00 cry, I feed him
6:30 wakeup

Now you know why I was whining about the lack of sleep. Poor Ryan got the brunt of it.

Here's what happened our first night of CIO:

7:30 bedtime
10:20 cried for an entire hour
12:00 cried, I fed him
3:00 cried for 20 minutes
5:00 cried, I fed him
6:30 wakeup

And our second night of CIO:

7:30 bedtime
12:00 cried, I fed him
5:00 cried, I fed him
6:30 wakeup


Much better, no? In a few weeks, we're going to let him CIO on the midnight feeding because I don't think he really needs it and then (hopefully) we'll have a baby who sleeps from 7:30 until 5:00. It took Liam a long time to drop that 5 am feeding so I'm not too worried about Evan hanging on to it for a while.

In the meantime, I'm already getting greedy about increasing my sleep some more. The poor boy is only waking up twice (as opposed to seven or more times) and I'm already looking forward to the day when he doesn't wake up at all and I can have eight hours of sleep in a row. I've almost forgotten what that feels like.

Thank you to everyone for your support on the CIO issues. It was tough to listen to him cry for an hour, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.