Goodnight!

For the past week and a half, Gabriel has surprised me. I didn't want to say something sooner, just in case it was a fluke, but with this much time gone by I think I can tell you that we may have hit the end of the bedtime tantrum (at least until he's a toddler). For the first couple of weeks that we were home with him, bedtime was no problem, he would go to sleep quietly. Then, the noise started. He would cry as soon as we put him down to sleep, and no amount of rocking, pacifier, or general parental attention seemed to have much effect. So, we started just closing the door, turning out the light and letting him deal with it. It would only take about 10-15 minutes, if that, before he was asleep, but this was a nightly ritual until just recently. He would even start fussing when we put his blanket on him, knowing what was coming. We started story time after putting on his blanket, just so he wouldn't make the bad association between blanket and the bedtime tantrum. Anyway, one night about a week and a half ago, he just quietly went to bed. Not to sleep, he was watching us, but there was no fussy baby nonsense. And the next night was the same. And the next. And now we're here a week and a half later and he was just calmly watching us as we got his food pump set up, hooked up and left him in his crib. Cool.

As for everything else, well, his feeding ability still remains plateaued at around 20mL, but we decided not to do the swallow study since it seemed that the kind of information they could get from it wasn't worth subjecting him to another xray study. He's already had more xrays in his short life than I have had in my entire 33 years. He's still growing, though -- just shy of 15 lbs at tonight's weigh-in. Next week, his SLP will be starting him on solids! Yay! I am so ready to move on from the bottle, and I think he is too. At least  if sitting up in his little chair for 20 minutes at a stretch and rolling from back to front and front to back are any indication. We bought a high chair this past weekend, so now he sits with us at dinner, too.