New Tricks

Apparently, yesterday afternoon Elliott realized he could roll over from his back to his tummy. (Daddy saw the first flip.) Unfortunately, this meant that last night's sleep was pretty disturbed as he kept rolling onto his tummy and then forgetting how to get back onto his back. I flipped him over a couple times (mainly because since we are still all in the same room, its pretty hard to sleep through the grunting and straining sounds of Elliott trying to get repositioned), but finally I was able to let him go (i.e. I fell asleep) and he ended up sleeping on his tummy. He did eventually get back on his back at some point. But this morning, I awoke to this:

He was pretty pleased with himself, as you can tell.

The other thing I thought I'd mention that was pretty new for this week was Elliott going to bed awake. He doesn't make it every night. Sometimes that last feeding before bed really does knock him out, like tonight. But we had several nights where he went down awake and only cryed a little. One night he had even stopped crying by the time I was able to turn the monitor on in the other room and two nights he didn't cry at all!

This was reinforcement that all parents just need to do things when it feels right to them. I know everything said we should have been putting him to bed 'drowsy but awake" for the last several months. But we know Elliott and until recently, he wasn't a 'crying it out' kind of baby. If we let him cry, he would eventually get so amped up, he would be wide awake for another hour. So we had been putting to bed asleep. He was going to bed really well this way and it worked for us. But we also wanted him to learn the skill of falling asleep on his own. We started feeling like he was ready to try going to be awake and we were right. And you know what? It was better on everyone. Now we just need to work on this skill at nap times as well.

And this video was taken last weekend while he was playing after a nap. He kept screaming...but it a good way. ;)