Sleep

So this morning baby woke up crying at 4:24 am. Wife says that we no longer go in to his room once he's down, so we both get to hear him cry for a while. Then in between his cries, we hear another baby crying. Baby #2 lives in the room above our baby, and is freaking out. We wonder if our baby woke him up, or if baby #2 woke ours up. The world may never know - it's basically a chicken and the egg scenario.

As I've mentioned, we live in an apartment complex, so I am not 100% comfortable letting our child "cry it out" in the middle of the night. For this reason we have started playing white noise really loudly in baby's room when he's crying himself to sleep. We're hoping this white noise will drown out baby's cries so our neighbors will only be able to hear really loud nothingness. The iPod we use for the white noise only has sleep timer settings of 15, 30, and 60 minutes. I chose 60 minutes two nights ago and was scolded for doing so. This morning I chose 30 minutes and started the white noise around 5:10 am once it was pretty evident that baby was going to be crying for a while.

We've established 6 am as baby's earliest allowable wake up time. Basically I am not allowed to go get him and bring him in for breakfast until 6 am at the earliest. I thought though, that if he was still crying at 5:40 when the sleep timer shut down the white noise, that we could make an exception and bring him in a few minutes early (since by then he'd been crying for 1.5 hours). Wife said no - not a moment before 6.

So 5:40 comes, the white noise stops, the baby keeps crying, and I start counting the minutes. If the baby makes one peep after 6 am, I'm home free - I can bring him in, wife will feed him, and I can escape to the couch where I'll start my workday. Then baby will inevitably fall asleep in my spot on the bed and wife can get a few more hours of sleep until she has to leave for work.

5:45 comes: still crying.
5:50: intermittent sobs.
5:57: a couple random noises.
5:59: a strange gurgling sound.
6 am: silence.

The punk kid fell asleep in the dwindling seconds before his liberation. He was so close to freedom, and he could not pull it out. I guess he doesn't care that much, since he's sleeping again, but still - it's kind of annoying.