The corner has been turned

It happened sometime mid-morning yesterday: Thomas began to sleep like a normal, healthy baby. After his first "naplette" of 20 minutes early in the day I wasn't optimistic. However, later in the morning, he napped for an hour, something that he has very rarely done before. Then, around noon, he napped for two hours. I couldn't believe it, and checked on him every 15 minutes to make sure that he was still breathing. Grandpa Yves, who was visiting, very kindly did not point out that I was being ridiculous, but he may have been thinking it.

Nighttime brought some welcome improvements too. He went down at 7:45 p.m., and after fussing for half an hour stayed down for over three hours. He finished the night with a solid four and a half hours of sleep, waking up at 6:30 a.m. Now, some of you might have done the math and spotted the two and a half hour gap in the middle. During this time he fussed a bit, I checked on him, and he didn't sleep much (or maybe even at all). Nevertheless, this is a dramatic improvement over where we were in the preceding days, and I daresay that in some cosmic sense, it's also an improvement over where he was before we began this process.

Anyhow, he's now two hours into his first nap of the day and I don't know what to do with myself since this is a new - but welcome - thing. We'll see how things go in the coming days, since it's too much to hope that progress will be completely linear. As well, exhaustion is doubtlessly playing a role. That being said, you can put me in the corner of the optimists for now.

Okay, enough about sleep. Thomas is actually up to some other interesting things besides learning to snooze in his crib (any one of which could merit its own blog post):

• He now has two teeth (which are still hard to see, but easy to feel).
  
• He's eating practically everything we eat (we mash it, cut it into small bits, or grind it up in our food mill).
• He's "sharing" objects by passing them back and forth with us.
• He has become an absolute whiz at peek-a-boo.
• He is obsessed with eating the cats' food (we have not allowed this).
• He will not stay still when we try to change him unless we distract him. The best way to do this is to play the harmonica that Grandma Shirley gave him for Christmas.
  
• His fine motor skills are coming along nicely, and he is learning to use his thumb and index finger to grab things (like bits of rice crackers or - if they're not fast enough - the cats).
  
• Beside being an expert crawler, he is now doing some tentative cruising.

Okay, he's waking up and I'm signing off. Thanks again for all of your support with this difficult process!