Each road to parenthood, each pregnancy and each baby are unique for every family. I’m pretty sure no two journeys to becoming parents are alike. During our journey I realized that it is best for new parents to keep in mind what works for some families may not work for yours …. and that’s OKAY!  You really need to figure out what is best for you and your baby and just go with it! Honestly a lot of what we did was trial and error. And then we would finally find something that worked one day only to find it didn’t work the next. While it was frustrating at times it is all part of the process and all parents at some point struggle to find solutions to solve their little ones needs.

Going into our pregnancy my goal was to stay blissfully unaware. That meant NO researching, NO reading, NO baby classes and NOT listening to others “not so pleasant stories”. It seemed all people wanted to share was their less than desirable experiences of child birth and frankly, I didn’t want to know what “could” happen. My birth story would be my own and there was no sense in worrying about something that “could” happen when it was totally out of my control! The ONLY thing I did do was listen to the Baby Wise book. It was important to me that we tried to get Kade sleeping as much as possible as soon as possible since I would go back to work after three months. The Baby Wise methods came highly recommended from so many people (giving their unsolicited advice)… that I thought I should at least give it a listen! And…. I’m glad I did! We used a lot of their techniques and lucky for us they seemed to work for Kade.

Thankfully Kade started sleeping most of the night at the end of April. He would have his final bottle between 11pm-1am and usually sleep till 7am. Fast forward till now and like I said not everything works the same. We had transitioned to giving Kade his final bottle by 11pm which still took us to a 7am wake up. However, the past few weeks Kade has been waking up in the middle of the morning 3am-5am for another feeding. I am hoping he is going through a growth spurt and will be back to sleeping through the night soon.

The lack of sleep has certainly been affecting my mood lately.  And some nights, or early mornings I should say, are just chaotic because I am still pumping! I will get up in the morning around 2am-3am to pump and then some nights Kade will wake up shortly after that wanting to be fed, so then I’m up twice! And while you might be questioning where is my husband to help…he is there and if I ask him to help he will. We have worked out a schedule that works for us where he stays up to give Kade the last bottle and gets Kade ready in the morning along with giving him a morning bottle between 6am-8am.  Our parenting is 100% a partnership… we have been blessed with a strong and very loving marriage but having Kade has deepened our connection.  We have been more patient, understanding and supportive than ever before and we each have had moments where we needed the other to take the lion’s share to catch up on sleep, take a little me time or just check out for few minutes to catch up on life!

Each month has brought new experiences of parenthood but at four months things are really getting FUN!  Taking family photos each month is really important to me to remember all the ways Kade is growing!  Maewood Photography captured a lot of Kade’s personality in these beautiful moments. He has been smiling a lot and starting to laugh!  He thinks it’s funny to grab his Dad’s beard and LOVED being on his shoulders!  Each day we are watching him experience the world in new ways.

 Our little Moose is growing up.

 Huge thank you to Maewood Photography  for capturing these beautiful moments!