Major announcement

Attention! If, for some strange reason, you happen to be standing up while you read this blog, please take a seat. You need to be seated for this news.

Everyone all settled now? Okay, good.

Ahem. I would like to announce that William--yes, the William David Wyckoff--slept through the night last night.

Did you get that? Here, let me repeat it. William slept through the night last night.

Mom, Daddy and I piled in the car and drove up to Vicksburg yesterday afternoon to go to their credit union and then meet Mama Lou and Grandaddy Bill for dinner. We had dinner at the Ameristar casino down on the river (yes, my 12-week-old son visited his first casino, a day after I took him to his first bar), then came back to Natchez. I gave William a quick bath, fed him, then put him down to sleep around 10:40. He played in his bassinette for a few minutes, then dropped off to sleep. I went to bed around 11:30 and woke up around 4:15, anticipating that William was going to wake up for a feeding. Around 4:30, he began to fuss and grunt, but he didn't break into full-scale crying. Tired, I just stayed in bed and listened to him. After 10 minutes or so of fussing, he began to quiet down on his own and went back to sleep. He woke up for real at 6:30, dirty and hungry. But since I didn't have to actually get out of bed and nurse him for 30 minutes in the middle of the night, I consider that to be an all-night sleeping episode.

Can you believe it?

Now, I'm realistic. With a young baby, everything is two steps forward, one step back. And sometimes, it's more of a matter of temporarily marching in place: one step forward, one step back until the baby decides it's time to finally move on. So I don't expect this sleeping-all-night thing, as glorious as it is, to be a regular event for awhile. William is still pretty young, not even three months old yet. But I will take it as a good sign that he CAN sleep through the night and that hopefully he WILL do it again someday. (Someday soon, ideally.) There have been nights where I wondered if I'd ever get a decent night's sleep ever again. I'm still tired because of the cumulative sleep deficit, and because I didn't really get that much sleep last night, but still! I can think of a million cliches to describe the feeling: the light at the end of the tunnel, etc.

By the way, William is crying right now. He did go back to sleep at 7 a.m. for an hour, then he played with Grandma, then ate again. I tried to put him back to sleep again, but he knows that he slept all night long, and he wasn't buying it. He's a funny little guy.