"Wait until he's 6 months..."

When Nolan was 2 months old, I was talking to a friend at a wedding who has a 2 year old and another one the same age as Nolan.  She said something to me that I distinctly remember.

"Just wait until he is 6 months old...you will fall so much more in love with him."  

I remember thinking that I couldn't possibly love him more than I currently did...but she was right.  For us, it happened closer to 5 months and has just continued from there.  Don't get me wrong, I have ALWAYS loved my son but over the past two months I've often found myself getting teary eyed not from frustration or lack of sleep, but from the overwhelming amount of love I have for him.  Yes, this is when we sleep trained him so that cut a lot of the stress I was feeling down so I was less sleep deprived making me able to enjoy life more.  But its also when he started interacting more and he became so much fun!  Now instead of smiling just for the heck of it, he smiles when he sees my face.  Instead of aimlessly batting for a toy, he actually plays with things (his favorites activities include ripping the pages out of magazines and watching his stuffed animals fall off the book shelf).  Instead of just lying on the floor, he crawls (yes, he started crawling at 6 months and 1 week!) to give me a hug or to meet Bryan at the back door after work.  He melts my heart on a daily basis.

Everyone always says the first 6 weeks are the toughest with a baby.  I think we were lucky that Nolan wasn't too difficult at the beginning.  For us, months 3 and 4 were the hardest.  I often questioned whether I was cut out to be a stay at home mom.  Heck, I questioned whether I was even cut out to be a mom at all!  I had feelings of "why did we do this??" and "what were we thinking having a baby?!?" which of course made me feel guilty and even worse than I already felt.  But the past two months, I can not imagine my life any different.  I am truly blessed that Bryan's career allows me to stay at home with Nolan because I couldn't imagine missing a single smile on his little face.  We still have our rough days (and nights) where he's overly fussy, clingly, and won't nap (like right now when his 4th...yes 4th!! tooth is trying to break through), but I am better able to handle them because they are the exception, not the norm from a few months ago.

Everyone also says that things, good and bad, are just a phase and will change soon.  While you know that to be true, when you're in the midst of a bad phase you feel like it will never end.  I couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel because no one could tell me how long that tunnel was.  Those two months were like being on a treadmill that never stops, each step making you more and more exhausted.  I dreaded the days because nap time was such a struggle and I dreaded the nights because I never knew if I'd get to sleep for 1 hour or 4 hours before Nolan woke up.  Dr. Ferber and Dr. Weissbluth were my sleep training saviors.  These two men deserve a blog post of their own because they are that brilliant!

I had been meaning to write this post for some time as my friend's comment kept popping into my head.  Now that Nolan is one day away from being 7 months old, I can only imagine that my love for him is going to continue to grow each and every day.