Yes I think I qualify.

Since he turned 4 months, Jack's sleep had regressed from 5-6 hours (first sleep) to 3 hours and last night, 1-2 hours.

He even rejected the pacifier I attempted to give him to coax him to sleep. In the end, only the boob would do. I relented.

Fortunately, thanks to the supportive hub and my wonderful parents, I can still work by day with a clear mind.

It's just that from around 9.30pm I turn into a zombie all through the next morning.

The quest for solutions begin. I plan to hit Borders later to check out more parenting books.

He is delightfully happy today playing with Grandpa, giggling and laughing as I type this. He was quite happy to play by himself, under our watchful eyes.

He's started on bananas this week and seems to really love it. I let him eat on his own and despite the mess, he's pretty skilled with feeding himself. :)

At the end of the day, despite the zombie-inducing sleep deprivation, it's still an unparallelled joy waking up next to his curious face peering at me and then a smile.

Last night I put Jack to bed at midnight. He'd had 2 hour-long naps in the day, one in the evening. I was so engrossed in finishing The Game by Neil Strauss that I didn't sleep till almost 2am. He woke at 2.45am, 7.20am, and then once more (I was too buggered to check when).

I had the ioniser on at Medium and then a/c on at Low. May have been my constant moving around that disturbed his sleep.

Let's try again tonight.

Jack had sleep regressed around 4 months (I think, memory no longer 100% reliable) from 5 hours to 4 hours, sometimes 2 hours but finally stabilised at 3 hours. At Borders' latest book sale, I picked up Dr Harvey Karp's Baby Bliss (also known as Happiest Baby on the Block).

Scouring through the book, I decided to try white noise (with our ioniser) set to low. Another realisation that hit was that around the time he sleep regressed, I'd started to set the air conditioner to Auto. Last night I turned it to Low.

Jack slept for 6 hours!

Was it the white noise, the constant temperature, or both? I'll bet on the temperature but will keep the white noise (from the a/c too anyhoo) on too.

We'll try the same config again tonight and we'll see if we get the same results. :D

The combination was irresistable.

Kino vouchers from the girls, Ange calling me for a shop-out (she has the Kino card), and that shop-out is a day after my birthday!

I bought:

The Game by Neil Strauss
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
Jenny and the Cat Club by Esther Averill
The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten by Julian Baggini

Earlier that month I'd picked up Einstein Never Used Flash Cards by Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, and Diane Eyer, three PhDs writing on evidence-based parenting. Their premise is that, as I understand it, children learn on their own from play (with encouragement from their parents) and structured learning is unneccessary and even harmful to their (particularly, creative) development. That is what I have always felt instinctively, as one brought up on play. Childhood needs to be returned to children.

An insightful evidence-based article from KellyMom.com.

Chocolate truly is the nectar of the gods.

One scoop of Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie is guaranteed to lift even the most surly of moods.

Parents never forget their children. Even if they were just together for a day...

The other day I went to the funeral of my sister-in-law's mother, an 80 year old woman who had suffered from Altzheimer's disease for several years. She had shut down almost completely about a month ago, no longer eating or speaking, and by the time death came it was a bit of a relief.

At the luncheon after the funeral, a brother of the deceased approached me and introduced himself. He was a dentist and had heard that I was a neonatologist. He told me of a son that he and his wife had 50 years ago who was born at "eight months" along. The baby had breathing problems and died at the age of one day, and the dentist wanted to know if there had been any progress made in the treatment of such babies and diseases.

I told him that yes, tremendous advances had been made, and that a baby like his if born today would likely be a relatively easy case. I told him about the advances made with mechanical ventilation of babies in the late 1960's and 1970's, and of the advent of widespread use of artificial surfactant in the early 1990's.

Although he seemed pleased to hear about the advances, he had a somewhat wistful expression on his face, and I said to him,"You never forget about your baby, do you?" He seemed relieved to have the sentiment acknowledged and started talking more about his dead baby boy. He told me that his son just couldn't seem to catch his breath, and he was reminded of it when he saw his Altzheimer's impaired sister take her last breaths. After our conversation he thanked me and we went our separate ways.

Fifty years ago a small baby lived for one day, and every single day since then his father must have thought of him. There is, I think, no stronger attachment than that of a parent for his or her child.

(Source: Neonatal Doc)

Death by alternative medicine: Who's to blame?

This is truly a case of believing yourself to death. The sad thing is she leaves behind three young children.

The patient still steadfastly refused all surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Against all evidence that the course she had chosen thus far had not resulted in the elimination of her tumor that she expected, she nonetheless insisted on continuing with various alternative medicine treatments. Against all evidence to the contrary, she continued to refuse any form of "conventional medicine." She still believed that her "healer" could save her life, even though she now had a large, bleeding, stinking mass in her breast stuck to her chest wall that had three years ago been a pea-sized cancer that could have easily been excised with a small surgical procedure. She was well on her way to dying in the horrific way that so many women died of this disease 100 years ago.

And a comment by a reader:

If you look at the claims for most alternative therapies, they are very heavy on spiritual and supernatural types of assumptions regarding potent powers, forces, and intentions -- either on a personal level or Nature as a benevolent guide.

Trying to argue a True Believer out of Alt Med is like trying to argue against the existence of God to just about anyone. The tricks and denials built into the apologetics will not only help them disregard just about anything you say, but they'll feel virtuous and wise while doing it. The oncologist is up against it, hard, in a culture which puts "being scientific" slightly lower than "having faith" on the personal merit scale.

(Source: Respectful Insolence)

More evidence that breastfeeding is good for baby but
is it the cause or correlation? Smart Moms + Smart Genes + Nutrition is the likely answer.

A study published this week in the British Medical Journal suggests that the advantage of breastfeeding on baby's intelligence could be explained not by the effect of breastmilk on the infant's developing brain, but by the fact that women who breastfeed are more likely to have higher IQs.

This is perhaps because IQ is correlated with social and economic class, and people in these classes are generally more likely to follow health advice promoted in education campaigns.

Hence, these babies might just be more likely to inherit neurodevelopmental advantages from their mothers (IQ is known to be partially heritable), and are probably more likely to benefit from a range of other factors which better socioeconomic conditions bring.

I suspect that advantage seen in breastfed babies might be a combination of social and genetic factors, as well as the effects of breastmilk.

We know that good nutrition in the early years is crucial to good brain development and breastmilk is a tailor-made for the purpose.

However, the brain also develops through interaction with the environment, so this nutritional advantage has to be balanced against social and educational experience.

(Source: Mind Hacks)