[Insert Title Here]

I'm really bad with titles, as you may have already seen. In fact, I think that was one of the harder parts about writing my thesis. I initially used Beatles' song titles for each of my chapters (Ch. 1, which dealt with the background of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis was called "Yesterday"; Ch. 2, which was about British and U.S. efforts to deal with the situation during the 30s and 40s, was "We Can Work it Out"; and Ch. 3, which focused on turning the situation over to the U.N. was simply "Help!") but I ended up changing them in the final draft, in part because I wasn't sure if I would then have to cite it. But I digress.

Things are going fairly smoothly here (knock on wood), with the exception of sleeping. I'm not sure what's going on, but Ronan's decided to take a break from the whole sleeping through the night thing. Last week was particularly bad. Tom worked Thursday and Friday, leaving me home alone to deal with everything. Ronan hadn't really napped on Thursday, but he was doing ok. Well, as soon as Tom walked out the door, the crying started. And nothing would work. He cried if I put him down, he cried when I picked him up. He cried eating baby food. He cried while nursing. He cried during his bath. Eventually, I was able to get him to go to sleep, but he woke up a lot during the night.

On Friday, I had to go to Akron to pick up an assignment, then drop Ronan off at daycare so I could go to a meeting at school in the afternoon. He didn't nap for more than half an hour in the morning and slept for part of our drive to Akron and then daycare. When I picked him up, they told me he hadn't napped at all, but he never really seemed tired or cranky. However, I wasn't feeling so good about this, but everything was ok until Tom left. Then the whole cycle repeated itself. I finally put Ronan in his crib and walked out. I could still hear him crying and it just was getting worse and worse, screaming at the top of his lungs. So after 30 minutes, I walked back in there, and this time I started crying myself. I picked him up and we were both crying until Ronan pulled away, looked at me, and then started laughing! Really laughing - deep belly laughs. Then he'd pull my hair and get my face right next to his and laugh some more. I still have no idea what was so funny (probably just the shock of me crying), but then we played for a little bit and he fell asleep without a problem.

I'm hoping we're moving past the problem (whatever it is), because we both could use more sleep. It's been hard for me to get any reading done for school without him napping for very long and by the time I get him down for the night, I'm so tired that I fall asleep after reading for about half an hour. Luckily, I'm usually a fast reader, so I think I can make it work, but I'll be happy when he's back on his usual schedule.

Other than that, not much is going on. He's saying "dada" a lot now and twice he's actually raised his hand when people say hi to him, as if he's going to wave. Probably just a coincidence, but maybe he's picked it up. Tom's working with him to start saying "mama" but so far no luck.