Don't Leave Me!!!

It appears that our little guy is going through a little bout of separation anxiety. I started to notice it a bit last week. Many times when I would put him down on the floor to play with some toys and then go into the kitchen, he would fuss the second I started to walk away. This past week, he started to fuss even if I would sit him in front of me to practice rolling the ball back and forth. Last night we started our first round of nighttime separation anxiety. I should have known that the bedtime routine went way too smoothly. Christopher was in bed before Daddy got home from the gym and he went to sleep without a peep. I breathed my usual evening sigh of relief and went out to make dinner. 45 minutes later he was screaming from the nursery. Long story short, after multiple trips in to help him settle down, we realized he would settle down as long as we were there but the second we even took our hand away from him, he would flip out. We read some things about this online and realized that this tends to happen between 6 and 9 months because that is when babies begin to realize that you are a separate person from them and, therefore, you can leave. Their fear of course is that you'll never come back, so the best thing to do is to go in and reassure them you are there and leave quickly. Eventually they will realize that you will come back, even when you are not in the room. So that's what we did until we went to bed. It worked pretty well and our man got a decent night's sleep, although this 5 AM wake up thing has got to go! Knock on wood, he doesn't have stranger anxiety yet but I'm sure that will come down the road eventually.