Technology saving the night…

I couple of posts back, I mentioned that Jacob seems to be a Jazz fan. When he is in his pack-n-play in the family room, we turn on the Music Choice channel and set it to the Jazz channel. It seems to calm our little boy down more than anything else.

Over the past week, Jacob has been growing and is eating much more often as well as eating a lot more. Last week was probably the toughest week (for Daddy) as I take the 1st late night feeding and I am also “Mommy’s ears” at night as she sleeps with her hearing aid off. Getting him fed and putting him back to sleep was a challenge for me. He just didn’t want to go back to bed sometimes. So much so, that on Thursday night I had to yield to the magical touch of Mommy so that I could get some needed rest before going to work.

For those reading this for the first time, Victoria has a cochlear implant and her hearing aid is not a traditional hearing aid. It communicates with a device inside her head. So, a portion of the hearing aid is attached to her head via a magnet. It is recommended that cochlear implant recipients give the skin between the two magnets a break from time to time…thus the reason she sleeps with it off.

Back to the story…

So, we purchased a 2nd sound machine (like the one we have used with Connor since he was a infant) hoping it would work magic on Jacob like it did for Connor. (Mistake #1). (This sound machine plays noises of crickets, rain, waves crashing, white noise, etc…)

We put Jacob in his crib several weeks ago…he doesn’t seem to like that as much as his pack-n-play. (Mistake #2).

We started letting him go to bed with his arms outside of the swaddle as this is how he sleeps during the day. (Mistake #3).

So, after some consideration/discussion and a rough week for Daddy…we moved Jacob back into our room so he could sleep in the pack-n-play. We also swaddle him completely again. And finally, no sound machine. Rather, we used iTunes download some Jazz music and placed it on Mommy’s iPod. Daddy had some speakers that hook up to it and it now plays while Jacob is in bed.

Nearly 5 hours of sleep tonight! I haven’t seen that in a while…thus my blog posting at 2:30am…mainly because I am not exhausted like I was last week.

Glad iTunes and the iPod could save the day…uhhh…night, that is!