Acclimation and Regression

by Phil

Over the past month my son has acclimated to our new apartment surprisingly well. Really, overall, he handled all of the stress from the move like a pro. My wife and I were worried that he would regress some from all of the upheaval.

The last few days that we were in our old apartment, he could tell something wasn't quite right. When we were packing, he would crawl around the apartment looking at the boxes with a suspiciously. An 11 month old with a suspicious look is super cute. He wasn't exactly keen on the movers who came to load up our stuff either. His poor little world was upside down.

For his first year, we took daily pictures with little updates on a dry-erase board. It was a fun project that really evolved as it went along to become a sort of photo baby book. Below are the last three days in our Tucson apartment. He looks happy and goofy in the photos but it's fairly easy to get him to smile for photos. Just do your best pig or chicken impression. Otherwise, he was visibly uneasy those three days.

Yes, our son wears the same pajamas two nights in a row.

Then came the traveling across three time zones. It included hotel stays as well as the homes of two different family members- one in Michigan, one in Ohio. By the end week, his schedule was nearly destroyed and he had a harder and harder time falling asleep as the days passed. Before the trip, he was a baby who slept through the night. Through this period, he woke up at least once, if not twice a night, often for an hour or more. Removed from his comfort zone, he was unraveling a tad.

Apparently, it wasn't much better when they first arrived to our new apartment. (I say "apparently" because I still didn't arrive for another five days. You can read my last post for that fiasco of a car repair/road trip schedule.) When I would talk to my wife on the phone, she would tell me how he was overly clingy and wanted to be held constantly. This was the kind of behavior we were afraid of.

All of our work with sleep training and such was being undermined. But, of course, we couldn't blame our son. It was totally understandable that he react this way. We just had to work with him to get gain back what progress we has lost.

And that brings us back to the first paragraph of my post. He has rebounded as if nothing ever happened plus more. He naps twice a day again and sleeps through the night with no problem. In fact, he's so good at sleeping that, after just bouncing him for a few seconds, he actually points to his crib. I imagine he's saying, "Put me there, please!" It's completely adorable. Although, my wife, who works all day and misses him, laments the fact that she doesn't get to snuggle with him for longer before he wants to be put down.

We just rewound to an earlier point in sleep training and stuck with it. A little while back Steve wrote about co-sleeping vs the cry-it-out sleep method. We are a strict cry-it-out household. We let him cry for 5 minutes, then go in and sooth him. If he cries again, we give him ten minutes, then go in and sooth him, etc. It has worked for our son, who now goes to sleep without much complaint and sleeps through the night. Consistency, as with anything when it comes to babies, was the key. Getting back into the old routine, the old rituals and recognizable comforts worked magic on his little brain.

An addendum- When I just sat down to write, this wasn't the original subject I was going to tackle at all! Well, you'll just get this week's subject next week then. It will make a good follow up, I suppose.