just being

When he suddenly crashed just after I picked him up when he started wailing, rather than attempting to move a loaded clothes horse over a pile of boxes with one hand in order to expose the pushchair into which he could be put for a nap I just wedged myself into a corner of the sofa, allowing him to sleep for an hour and a half rather than the usual half an hour. Unfortunately I couldn't quite see his face but the gentle puffing noises were nice to listen to.

Apart from the few remaining irregularities and inconsistencies in his sleeping (sometimes two naps, sometimes one (sometimes after lunch, sometimes in the morning)) he can now generally be reliably expected to go down sometime between 19:00 and 20:00 and not wake up until sometime after 05:00, sometimes as late as 06:30 but certainly not reliably often enough to consider it a realistic hope. It still counts as the whole night, especially when he's now going to sleep with no wailing whatsoever, just a bit of chatting to his monkey after he scuttles up to the head end of the cot to retrieve it after we lay him down. With Nicky's discovery of a toothbrush which has a handle-end of a sufficiently different shape to be clearly distinguishable from the bristle-end he can now sort of brush his teeth without anguish. The only remaining problem is his refusal to stay on his back long enough to get his nappy changed. There's presumably some sort of fancy psychological technique available (similar to the ignore-them­­® method of bringing about night-long sleep) to persuade him to cease writhing but in the meantime it often requires at least two people to keep him still enough to stop him testing how far he can get before anything clinging to his skin is shaken free.