Sleepy-Head

Since Eli has perfected the art sleeping through the night, we have started working on getting him into a nap schedule during the day. Eli has been pretty good about letting us know when he is tired by whining and saying, "nya, nya, nya, nya" so it wasn't hard to figure out a pattern of times throughout the day when he is tired the most.

When it is time to put him down for a nap we do a small routine of laying him down in his crib, giving him his pacifier and a blanket, and turning on some soft music (usually Neko Case or Feist- I have yet to develop a tolerance for kid music and try to avoid it as much as I can for now). It's kinda funny to watch him fall asleep because he sometimes looks like he's playing peek-a-boo with himself. He'll grip his blanket and pull it up to his face, then squirm a little and pull it back down. He'll do this until he falls asleep and sometimes he passes out before he can pull the blanket back down. When I walk in and see him in crazy position like this, I can't help but laugh.

On the flip side, though, it kind of makes me paranoid knowing that he is moving around so much in his crib and I end up checking on him a lot while he is sleeping. Sometimes I stand just out of his view and watch him as he tosses and turns and sometimes I just creep in and check to make sure he hasn't worked his way into a corner of his crib or under a pile of toys. When he is really struggling to fall asleep he will repeatedly lift his legs to his chest and kick them back out, which causes him to scoot around the crib. One night, he turned a full 180 degrees in his crib from all his fish-flopping! I check on Eli about 3-4 times before I end up going to bed at night just to make sure he is alive and sleeping well, but also to keep my mind at easy.