camping, colds, and sleep

Last weekend we did our second attempt at camping.  We drove up Geneva Creek, off of Guanella Pass Road.  It was a fun easy 4wd all the way up to just below the continental divide, topping out at about 12,000 ft.  We really really really wanted to camp up there in the "Geneva City" basin, but unfortunately, with the incredibly wet, snowy winter that the high country had this year, the mosquitoes were positively swarming, so we descended.

The lower part of the road was extremely busy with campers - even though this was dispersed camping - so we grabbed a wide spot in the road to camp.  Not our ideal situation, but it worked.  We took the three man tent this time, which was palatial in its accommodation.  We tried the suggestion of Terry and Tara, which was to swaddle him and have him sleep on the cushy changing pad.  This takes up a lot of room in the Jeep, but is a nice place for baby sleeping.

Dressed to combat mosquitoes and late afternoon sun.

Luxurious mattress

In the three-man tent

Chilly morning in camp.

Andrew didn't have the best night camping, but what we didn't realize at the time was that he was coming down with a cold.  He spent the following day pretty out of it, and we had a panicked night of constructing tents in the bedroom at home where he could sleep in the bouncy chair (semi-inclined) with the humidifier (which I wish we had a picture of).  This was followed by two nights of sleeping in the swing in the closed-up bathroom with the vaporizer running.  Then he graduated to sleeping in the crib with the mattress inclined by a pillow. This has worked surprisingly well.

I brought him back to my bed for a night, and neither of us had very good sleep.  So last night, I swaddled him up and put him down in the crib after reading Goodnight Moon, something I hope will become part of our bedtime routine:

He went down at 9pm and had three wakeups - 1:30am with a feeding, 3:30 am (just gave him the pacifier and rocked him back to sleep), and 4:45 am with a feeding.  I'm mostly confident we can get rid of that 3:30 break.  And then, though he was making noises from 6am on, he didn't get up until 7:15a.  So if you don't count the 3:30a wakeup, that's a 4.5 hour block followed by a 3-ish hour block and then a couple more hours before fully awake... I can handle this!  I got great sleep in spite of getting up to walk to the next room.

I think that for the time being, this means the end of co-sleeping for us.  We'll see what happens when I go back to work.  I've heard that the best sleeping arrangement is the one that gets everyone in the house the most sleep, and for one night at least, I think we all had a great night.