a challenge

everytime, when i take Christian out, he would get looks from random strangers and inevitably, those random strangers would look at me and then glance back at Christian. If Eric is with us, we will get those darting looks from baby - mommy - daddy and back to baby and sometimes, another look at mommy. For some reason, there are people who'd come up to me and ask if Christian was my baby. Go figure. And very often, we'll also get people coming up to us (usually to me) and commenting how cute Christian is and they will linger and play with him. I know that as a parent, you will always think your offsprings are cuter than any living thing in the world. I think he's cute and all but he's not so cute during the night! His sleeping habits are getting from bad to worse, and I think we are contributing to it. First, we never did this shift thing, i.e. Mommy nurses and daddy gets up to make formula and they take turns. It was always mommy when it comes to night-time feeding. And when you are dead tired and you have this crying kid in the darkness, you just whip out your breast and groggily, you nurse. I'm getting this feeling that he's not really hungry at night now, and is doing this out of habit. So, I'm putting an end to it. I'm going to feed him a big feed before he sleeps and stop the intermittent night feeding. I have to say, Christian was sleeping through the night at 5-6 months and his first teething episode simply threw all this away. He just turned 10 months yesterday, which means we've been enduring this night-time crying for 5 months. I was teaching like crazy for the past 5 months and didn't have the time to think about conditioning him, but now, I'm going to put a stop to this. So, here's my list of to-do's:

(a) Finish up my renovation preliminaries (oh, did i mention that we bought a place and i'm deep in reno gunk? i'll update you another time.)
(b) Clear out my research deck (2 papers have to be sent out to referees)
(c) Apply for maternity, child-care, vacation leave, whatever it takes. (heh, i have 60 days of vacation leave)
(d) gently ship mom out ("mom, you need a break, let me take over"), i need to do this as my mom watches christian on weekdays and she simply cannot stand a crying baby, she'll have a mental breakdown or she'll call social service or even kill me.
(e) be prepared to be dead-tired, hmm...my mom might as well kill me and be done with it.

Hopefully by Lunar New Year, we'll be sleeping well and enjoy lots of prosperity and good luck.

Oh, of course this is an executive-decision post, I haven't talked to Eric about it. But that's what this blog is partly about - a respository that sometimes contains surprises and shocking updates.

postscript: While we were shopping at Carrefour last night, we found out that Christian had just sprouted another tooth - altogether he has four at the bottom, 3 on top. this (hopefully) explains the waking-at-every-freaking-hour syndrome the past few nights. he slept well last night (fingers crossed).