Early Teething and Sleep Habits

Oliver will be 3 months next week and it is sooo hard to believe.  According to Happiest Baby on the Block he is about to complete the "missing 4th trimester" and will be officially "ready to be born!"  I can't believe it-- already!  I'm going back to work in only a few short weeks-- part time-- and it seems much too soon.  Perhaps I should've put it off till after I've stopped nursing?  Oh well; it's like having a baby, getting married, buying a house-- as in all major decisions in life, there's never really a "right" time.

Anyway so at his 2m checkup he weighed 14lbs9oz and he's easily 15lbs now.  So I suppose it makes sense that as the rest of his body is maturing beyond his age (getting to be such a big boy) so are his teeth!  I swear a few weeks ago he was gnawing on stuff and I said to Phil, "Man he looks like he's teething...  but they don't teethe this early, at just over 2m, do they?"  Then one night-- Dec. 11th-- Oliver nursed for SIX hours straight.  That's one heck of a growth spurt, right?  So I called the pediatrician and the lactation specialist, Gloria, told me he was probably teething.  Wow was she right!  So I broke Sophie the Giraffe, the Land of Nod high class teething toy, out of the packaging and gave it to Oliver.  He started teething away on it straight away.

Teething to Sleep

So at about the same time that Oli started teething he also started sleeping through the night until 5ish in the morning to eat and then asleep again till 8 or 9.  Wonderful!  Only bad thing is, the teething makes it hard for him to FALL asleep.  Poor little guy!  First we gave him tylenol, on the recommendation of the pediatrician.  But we couldn't very well  drug him every night.  So the next night I tried rubbing peach shnapps on his gums to numb them.  But he LOVED the shnapps so he lapped it right up before it could do its numbing job.  Next we tried Motrin, on the recommendation of Kelly, the pediatric nurse who lives on the block, but everyone told us that it's really not to be used under 6months and our OWN pediatrician didn't tell us to use it...  so even though the motrin worked like a dream, we decided not to use it again.  I tried rubbing cognac on his gums next.  Oliver didn't like that at ALL so it got to numb the gums a little bit.  But it only worked for a minute or few.  

Now I have to go pay attention to my Oliver and finish this post another time!