Sleeping like a... baby?

So Mr Silas is six months old as of yesterday.  He is a truly lovely little boy... very affectionate and happy.  He is eating real food and drinking my milk like the others did.  He laughs when you play round-and-round-the-garden on his tummy like the others.

And just like the others, he is awakening my parental obsession: baby sleep (which of course morphs into toddler sleep as they get older).  Once again the quality of my day is becoming about how well he sleeps...or as in the case of this afternoon, doesn't sleep... Once again I am wracked with anxiety around whether he is getting enough sleep and guilt that I cannot just 'clear the decks' (like I could when Bede was little) and stay home to get him back into routine, or to let him recover from a particularly busy couple of days...

Today was the second big day in a row... the morning was fine... he woke up late after a night which included an extra feed... he slept on the way to our new church and was good during the service...he slept in the carrier on me for a while, had some lunch and stayed awake in the car... we thought we would put him down for a nap then given that he had been awake for almost three hours by then... but all our efforts were to no avail... the window of sleep had shut, and he got progressively more and more overtired...and less and less likely to just drop off... and more and more grumpy.  In the end, he was so over tired that dinner was a non-event (meaning that he screamed so much he wouldn't eat anything)... the usual calmer downer of the bath didn't work (he screamed through his bath...an almost unheard of occurrence)...and was asleep for the night by 6.15... an hour earlier than usual...

This reminds me why I am so protective of my kid's sleep... lack of it can derail a perfectly nice Sunday afternoon, and a perfectly happy relaxed mood... but it also reminds me that I need to learn  to lighten up a little more... something I thought might have happened by now...three kids later... 

But as Anne Shirley was known to say, "Tomorrow is fresh with no mistakes in it"... or in my case...no skipped naps in it...yet.