Raising Himself

I know I'm biased, but Nicholas is amazing. His recent awe-inspiring thing is beating us to the punch on things we intend to teach him. A few recent examples:

• Pacifiers. We had worried about how we were going to wean him off the pacifier, but he has already started. In the last few weeks the pacifier has ceased to work magic. If he is calm and tired he will sometimes take it, but if he is upset, he just screams around it. I know this is good in the long run, but it means I can no longer feel safe taking him places since I have no magic bullet.
• Bedtime. Nicholas has decided to push his bedtime up. The first couple of times he was acting really tired at 8, we resisted out of fear that he'd think it was a nap and wake up at 10 ready to go. But then we started putting him to bed then and he stayed. And the past few days he has started insisting it was bedtime a little after 7. Well, we're finally starting to learn, so it only took 2 nights of this before we began putting him to bed then. These dissertations may actually get written after all if he keeps this up.
• Falling asleep on his own. Remember how a couple weeks ago I wrote about our goal to eventually get Nicholas to start going to bed without nursing himself to sleep? You guessed it--he beat us to it. A few days after that, before I had gotten up the courage to actually try this, he was fighting me as I tried to feed him before bed and then started sucking his thumb when he came off. Aha! I get it now, you want to go to sleep. Okay, let's see how this goes. And go to sleep he did. He has now done this 4 nights in a row.

And so I'm tempted not to worry about things we'll eventually need to break him of because he seems to be one step ahead of us. At some point he'll need to stop sucking his thumb to go to sleep and stop napping in the swing (yeah, I know I said we were going to start enforcing naps in his crib, but even though he now falls asleep there, he won't stay asleep longer than an hour, and we all need him to take longer naps than that), but for the time being I'm just going to sit back and wait for a cue from him. He seems to know what he's doing.

Sometime soon I need to write a post on one of the days when I'm frustrated, lest you think Nicholas is an angel. Really there are days when I meet Joe at the door, hand him the baby, and threaten to catch the next plane to the Caribbean. Although even on those days I have to admit that he is absolutely adorable.

See?

From Nicholas - Month 4