Humble Pie?

Perhaps I should have named my blog something like "The Humbled Father" or "Just When You Thought You Were Getting the Hang of Things . . ." It seems that in my short experience as a father (Lukas was born June 27, 2007) every time my wife and I (especially me) begin to think we have things about figured out (and I mean figured out to the point we can start to do a bit of bragging to our friends and families that we have reached a certain milestone) life, or to be more specific parenthood, has a nice little way of reminding us that we are still amateurs. It slaps us upside the head and says "just what were you thinking anyway?"
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Case in point. Sleeping through the night! We spent the first 5 1/2 months of Lukas' life struggling with sleep deprivation. The first 6 weeks we were both off work so, even though we only slept in 1-2 hour increments, we slept when he did an were able to manage to get 8 hours of sleep in in the course of a day. After the first 6 weeks, I went back to work and tried to adjust. I continued to get up and help Mrs. LIAYF out at every feeding and would go to work on only a few hours of sleep, trying to catch up on the weekends. To compound matters, we have a very old and noisy house (think very creaky 100 year old fir floors!) and often when we would successfully get Lukas to sleep, the slightest step in the wrong place would result in eyes popping open suddenly, followed very shortly by intense screaming!
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We compensated by using a pacifier, swaddling, nursing, and rocking him to sleep, all of which had varying levels of success but accomplished one unintended thing. Lukas never learned to put himself to sleep without those sleep aides.
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We were of the mind early on that we wanted Lukas to sleep in his crib in his own room so that is where we would put him down for the night, swaddled and with a pacifier. Life was getting better. We were now getting 2- 3 hour stretches, sometimes even 4. Then, just when we thought we were getting things figured out... Lukas began to spit out the pacifier and wake up wondering where it was! This began to happened more and more frequently, until I was getting up almost on the hour to run back to his room to give him the pacifier and get him back to sleep. It had to stop! I was almost falling over tired at work as was Mrs. LIAYF at home. We decided to begin to take away sleep aides. First it was the rocking, then the swaddling, then the night nursing so that all that was left was the pacifier and it had to go!
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Yes, there was a lot of crying and yes was PAINFUL to hear (we stayed and comforted him every 5-10 minutes)! But in the end, Lukas learned to put himself to sleep and began to sleep through the night more often (7:30 -6:30). We were ecstatic! This is where the humbling part comes in. It may just be coincidence, but it seems that whenever we decide, because we are so ecstatic, to brag a bit and let people know how well Lukas is doing, things go horribly sideways!
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Well, not horribly really, but just not nearly as well as they were. We decide to brag that Lukas is sleeping through the night, so he begins to roll over in his crib several times a night and cries for someone to help, or decides that 1 AM is actually playtime and not sleep time. Parenting is a work in progress! So, if you are one of our friends or family who listens to us brag about sleep, or some other milestone Lukas has reached, please just give us that knowing look or come right out and remind us that we are really still amateurs and not to get to comfortable, because we are just getting started on this parenting thing.
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We will thank you later!