Our first holiday season as a family of four

 At this point, we are going to try to continue to write every 2 days as we catch everyone up on our story. Thank you for reading, deciding to follow us on our journey, and sharing our story. We are hoping to help any other families in our situation.

We typically spend Thanksgiving with our family in Connecticut. After traveling with the boys to Florida and our experience with Nate away from home, we were nervous to say the least. But, as usual, he kept us on our toes and actually did well!

Nate and Ben on Thanksgiving

As December rolled around, Nathan's little personality was beginning to arrive. He began to recognize his name right before he turned 3 months old. And, he had, and still does have, the best facial expressions around. We went to visit with Santa with the boys and he had everyone cracking up.  

 For the first 2 weeks of that month, he cried. He cried a lot. He didn't have his 4 month appointment with the pediatrician until January so we continued to do our best with consoling him and doing everything possible to make him comfortable. He was not a fan of being put down and all he wanted was us to hold him and walk around. While at a Mom's playgroup that was run by a nurse at our local hospital, craniosacral therapy ( https://www.craniosacraltherapy.org/Whatis.htm ) was brought up. A therapist in our area came in to talk about it so we decided to give it a try with Nate. We figured, at this point, we have nothing to lose. If he would calm him down for even five minutes, we would take that as a win. His first appointment was on December 12. We were anxious knowing that all he did was cry with us and gave the therapist the heads up that this was the case. The three of us went to the appointment together and it was a calming environment. The therapist was very grandfatherly and spoke in a soothing voice. He held Nathan up on the table and gently placed his fingers over several different parts of his head and stomach. He was even able to stop him from hiccuping. Stephen and I were impressed with that alone, but also how calm Nate was with him. Once the appointment was over, we drove home. Not only did, Nate fall asleep quickly in the car on the way home, we were able to transfer him from the car seat to the couch without waking him up. This was the longest he was calm and not crying in 3 1/2 months!! We were beside ourselves. We basically just stared at him the entire time making sure he was still breathing. We couldn't believe it! We decided to make another appointment in two weeks; that second appointment yielded similar results. The therapist was thinking that Nate was "full of tension" and it may take several visits to work that out of his system. The first few visits were every two weeks and then we moved to every six weeks for maintenance. We were hopeful yet again that we were on the right path.