give me back my son!

Years ago, someone I know did a great impression of Mel Gibson yelling, "give me back my son!" from the movie Ransom. We're talking practicing in front of the mirror and stuff. You know who you are.


That's how I feel right now about Ben. I look at him and ask, 'who are you and what have you done with Ben?'

I don't know what it is, but for the past 4 nights he's been up multiple times, standing in his crib and crying. He's not taking the naps he's supposed to. He's generally cranky.

I had trouble like this awhile back with him, and I found a site which explained things in layman's terms.

Your baby is also going through enormous developmental spurts that you can't see, because they're dealing with cognitive processes. They work through these spurts the same way they work through the physical spurts, but when your baby is practicing recognizing patterns, you can't see that. Leading up to the actual new skill the baby is going to go through several weeks of intense brain work and prep that you can't necessarily see (unless you know specifically what to look for). One of the side effects of this brain work is that they don't sleep as well as they do during times in which they're not about to master a new skill. They may seem restless in the night (like they do sometimes when mastering a physical skill) but it's just nothing you can see and label. So we call it a sleep regression.

Once a baby has learned the new skill, s/he will often sleep through the entire night for 1-3 nights after mastering the skill. Which is freaky from the parents' perspective, because you go from waking 10 times one night to sleeping 12 hours the next. But it makes complete sense if you know that the baby was working on this really tough challenge and couldn't help but wake up so often (in fact it's probably a miracle that the baby could even fall asleep in the first place with so much going on in the noggin), and then once they've got it they relax and sleep it off for a couple of days, like sleeping off a crazy party. Then they'll most likely go back to sleeping the way they were before they started working on the new developmental skill.

I cant feel any new teeth or anything, but I'm guessing it's some sort of sleep regression - something he's working on (walking? standing up? doing his times tables? who knows?). This explanation makes sense to me, and makes me feel better - if for no other reason than that it gives me some hope that things will go back to 'normal.'