Lately I've been losing sleep

BabyM is not a good sleeper. I won't go so far as to say she's a BAD one, because I know it could be MUCH worse. But at 15 months, I can count on two hands the number of times she has slept through an entire night without waking, and I'm not close to running out of fingers.

Cute, funny, smart. But not a great sleeper. Yet.

There's not much I can do about it now besides vent here. Since Nov 11, we've been in various transitional sleeping situations thanks to the huge home remodel. We moved her crib to my parents' place which was her first time sleeping in a room by herself. After a month, we decided sleeping at home all together at night might be easier, so at night she's in a Pack N Play in the living room, with her sister on a mattress nearby (out of sight) and me on the couch. She still naps at my parents' condo in her crib.

On a great night, she doesn't wake at all. This has happened maybe 6 times EVER. 

On a good night, she'll wake once for milk around 1am, drink it fast and go right back to sleep. 

On a not-so-good night, she'll wake twice for milk but go right back to sleep. 

On a wretched night (like yesterday), she'll wake at 1am, drink milk and then be awake for HOURS, and woe unto us if we try to put her back down. Eventually, around 5am, she'll go back to sleep for a few hours. And of course by then, we can't get back to sleep.

Big Sister T has been oblivious to most of this - once she's out, she sleeps like a ROCK. It's amazing, really.

I know what I need to do with BabyM - work on getting her to stop waking at night for milk and eat more during the day.  Let her cry for a bit after confirming she's ok (doesn't need a diaper or ibuprofen, isn't sick, etc). But we can't start a new sleep plan while we're all camping in our living room.

So we're gritting our teeth and getting through the next couple of weeks. The project is almost finished - we have paint on the walls, bathroom cabinets and counters, some window trim, doors and lighting installed. This week all the flooring should be complete and the following week is for all the little details and cleaning. Fingers crossed, knock on wood, salt over the shoulder, etc. 

And then we can work on getting better sleep around here!  I am so ready to accept that challenge.

For a giggle, check out my friend D's post about parenting and sleep on her shiny new blog.

I'm on my way, home sweet home

Our huge remodeling construction project is scheduled to finish in 27 days. It's about 2 weeks behind the very aggressive schedule they posted at the beginning. The estimate was 14-16 weeks, but the actual schedule was for 13 weeks. So the 2 extra weeks aren't terribly unexpected, though I cry a little inside every time we meet with our production manager and he moves the schedule.

Someone told me that cats are very attached to the house they live in, and tend to freak out if you have to take them somewhere else. I must be part cat. We've been in a state of limbo for about 8 weeks and I'm feeling very unsettled and unfocused. 

At first we thought it best for me and the girls to move entirely to my parents' condo (which they don't use in winter), and TJ would stay overnight with the dogs at home, after spending the evenings at the condo with us. We did that for about a month, and it was very stressful for me.  Being the nighttime go-to parent every single night is hard!  (And it made me realize how often TJ picks up night duty!)

So once the major demolition was done and the new portion of the house was framed and insulated, we moved back home. We have a living room, family room, bathroom and kitchen available to us, so it's definitely livable. We're camping out in the living room - BabyM in a Pack N Play, T on her mattress on the floor, and one of us on the couch, while the other sleeps downstairs to keep Peanut company.  (He has too much trouble moving on the hardwood floors to sleep upstairs with us.)  Surprisingly, everyone sleeps pretty well in this arrangement. 

Despite being pretty cramped, it was SO much less stressful to have everyone in the same house, even if it was a construction zone. We get up just before the construction guys come, get ready, and leave the house for the day. The girls nap at the condo, and we head back around 4 when the construction is finished for the day. On weekends we hang out at home and it feels pretty good to be all together in OUR house, despite the lack of bedrooms and all of us sharing one bathroom.

This week we're back at the condo full-time because they're priming and painting the addition, and it's pretty stinky. So back to being unsettled and solo parenting at night. For a few days it's not too bad. 

This photo that TJ sent me keeps me going:

My craft room got painted today!  The color is Benjamin Moore 606, Island Paradise, a warm saturated aqua green.  I can't wait to see it after the second coat and in person, but I can already tell from the photo that this was the right choice for me.

This and the attached playroom were on my dream list. A purpose-built space for me and the girls to work together on crafts, schoolwork, and fun. I haven't planned out yet where everything will go, and what else we might need to furnish them (definitely more shelving!) but will play it by ear once we unpack everything.

I haven't posted more photos of the project because I haven't gone through them yet.  We've taken a ton, but our lives have been so complicated - construction, travel, holidays, preschool drama, and of course, Spike.

So I've got to live with another month of unsettled-ness, and then we can move back into our space. So exciting!

Project Life 2013: A Riot of Color

I don't usually comment on current events, but if you and/or yours were in Boston today, hope everyone is safe.

This Project Life layout was a bit uninspired. I was excited to have time and space to work on it, but couldn't settle on a color scheme. I was underwhelmed by the Kelly Purkey kit I bought for Project Life, and also not that thrilled with the April Studio Calico kit. Not a good month for new supplies, I guess. 

I knew I wanted to use the yellow "Springtime" card since we've finally had some decent weather! So I built the color scheme around it, which is not my favorite, but at least it's bright and fun. I used cards from the April SC kit, my new Jade Project Life kit, and the new Me and My Big Ideas line at Michael's, along with some of that fabulous American Crafts glitter tape.

I also used a lot of sequins, and after some experimentation, found that Scotch 2-way scrapbooking glue is the best for adhering individual ones, because it has a nice small tip on the bottle.

This isn't one of my favorite layouts - it just ended up being a bit too eclectic and not cohesive enough.  But with 52+ pages in the year, I can't expect to love all of them. Imperfection is acceptable, and what's important to me is that I have photos I love and wrote down the highlights of our weeks.

(Click each photo to see a bigger version.)

Mar 25 - Apr 7: Favorite restaurant, friends, activities ;)

Mar 25 - Apr 7: Food & sleep!

Glitter tape, sequins and SC kit cards, oh my!

One really cool thing I learned this week was how to use Lightroom to simplify my photo selection and printing process.  I used their 'Smart Collections' feature to filter on the date range for this spread, which quickly gave me the set of photos from which to choose.  I then used a color label to mark the ones I wanted to print, which made it easy to review my selections and swap things in/out.

I then used Lightroom itself to print (instead of the Canon EZ Print app), and taught myself how to save templates to get multiple photos on a page. Now I've got a few standard templates for my PL photos, which will really streamline the process for me. The only thing I haven't figured out is how to fix the fact that my photos print much darker from Lightroom than from the Canon app.  I'm sure it's some horribly complex issue about screen brightness and ICC color profiles, neither of which I care to understand in great depth.  I'll be searching online for a quick and easy solution.

And in good news, I've commandeered BabyM's bedroom to be my temporary craft room until we figure out a solution for the leak. Since she sleeps in our room and will until she's no longer eating at night, we've been using her room for miscellaneous storage and the occasional guest. I'm so excited to have a dedicated space again.

Here's a slide show of my 2013 pages, including close-ups.  If you can't see it, click here to view my entire 2013 Project Life gallery.

I belong with you, you belong with me

So remember when I wrote wistfully about how cosleeping never worked with BabyT? Yeah, let's file that under "be careful what you wish for".

BabyM will not sleep in her crib. She will begrudgingly stay there quietly for 10 minutes since we bought her this flashy light up musical "soother" (which does not soothe!), but sleep she WILL NOT.

She's been sleeping in our bed for a few months now, aka most of her life since she's only 5 months old. I got over my paranoia about blankets and suffocation and baby being squished by one of us, in favor of more sleep. 

And it's true, we do get more sleep. I do not feel sleep-deprived, but the quality of the sleep I'm getting isn't great, so I need a LOT. And I'm a high-sleep-needs person to start with, so now it's even worse.  It seems as though BabyM is enjoying her proximity to The Milk, so she wakes a few times to nurse. On the rare occasion we've gotten her to sleep somewhere else (like the crib - once!) or when I go sleep elsewhere, she only wakes once.

So yeah, we'd love to get her to sleep in her crib at the end of our bed - just a few feet away, which to BabyM might as well be across the country.  I can't say I blame her - our memory foam mattress and fluffy duvet are very nice to sleep with.

She's training us well - anytime we invest some time and effort into getting her to sleep elsewhere, she falls asleep easily but then wakes every 20 minutes or so, requiring us to soothe her back to sleep. When we give up on this plan, and just take her back to our bed, she sleeps the next 7 or so hours straight. That's one smart baby.

Sleeping with her is very much like sleeping with Spike, our beagle (who, thankfully, is not allowed in our bed). We start out in our own space, but in the middle of the night, I find a little warm body snuggled up next to me, slowly pushing me over to the very edge of the bed. 

It's frustrating because I keep waking so often - I think I must be responding to some kind of change in her breathing, because I wake up right before she does most of the time. And as nice and cuddly as she is, I do like sleeping by myself, with no one *touching* me. 

But as they say, "the days are long but the years are short" and soon enough she won't want to sleep in our bed.  It makes sense that evolutionarily, babies probably like to stay with their mamas most of the time. And I know every time we try to "make" a baby do something, it never works, and just frustrates us as well as them.

So I'm admitting defeat. I don't want to make it harder on myself by doing some elaborate "sleep training" routine. We'll try something different when she's not sleeping well, or if we aren't getting enough sleep. But for now, I'm embracing my inner crunchy mama.

I'm learning to live

It's been a little over 2 weeks as a family of four and so far it's gone much better than I expected.  Most of this is due to the fact that TJ is home so we're pretty much always dividing and conquering.

Things that are going well:

No meltdowns yet, from anyone.  I'm pretty surprised, to be honest.  I suppose it's too early to get too excited about that, though.

Everyone is fed, clothed, clean and mostly happy.  That's a big deal, right?  BabyM sleeps in pretty good stretches usually - 2.5 hours up to 8 hours once (!).  It's all over the place - sometimes during the day, sometimes at night, but I'll take it.

I'm off the pain meds.  I can drive!  Things (mostly) don't hurt.  I can leave the house on my own! (In theory anyway.  In practice I need to take The Baby since I'm the only one who can feed her.)

I'm pretty well-rested.  I am one of those people who can nap anytime, almost anywhere.  TJ holds down the fort with T since I've got all the night duty with The Baby.  (I know, he is so awesome.)

I'm (mostly) accepting that I don't *have* to do anything right now except take care of my family.  It's hard for my Type-A self, but I keep reminding myself I have about 20 weeks left at home.  That's a long time.

Nursing.  So easy this time.  And efficient.  Loving the snuggly quiet time with BabyM, and also sometimes T keeps us company and "reads" us a book.

Things I'd like to be better:

T is waking multiple times at night and requires soothing.  Not surprising considering the circumstances but very rough on TJ who is NOT a napper.  I can't help much yet since I'm already up a couple of times with The Baby, but I'm hoping it'll iron out soon.  Sort of wondering if cosleeping will fix it - the one night she came to our bed, she slept through *everything*.

I had forgotten how ridiculously hard it is to leave the house with a baby.  T has gotten pretty self sufficient - she can put on her own shoes/jacket, use the bathroom and mostly dress herself.  We're starting over.  It took us 90 minutes to get out the door this morning to go to the Children's Museum.  Thankfully we didn't need to be there by a certain time.

BabyM hates the carseat.  I don't know why.  On the bright side, she almost always falls asleep after a few minutes of driving.  But this is the only time she really cries, and it's awful.

I still don't want to make a lot of plans with people.  First, it's hard to get out of the house and be somewhere at a certain time, not to mention, I may not want to be awake at that time.

Then I have to figure out the nursing-in-public thing, made more complicated by the fact that I can't find my nursing cover up.  The blanket over the shoulder trick is NOT working for me.  Also, it's so much easier with the enormous nursing pillow.  Sigh.

I miss my big girl.  I miss having uninterrupted time with her.  I'm often still asleep when she leaves for preschool in the morning.  She is here and awake for such limited hours that I feel like I'm missing out.  Sniffle.  Nearly every book-reading session or art project is interrupted because The Baby needs to eat and right now I'm the only one who can feed her. 

Which leads me to Introducing the Bottle.  We need to do this, but I'm afraid.  One of the nurses at the hospital gave her a paci (I know, too early!) and she took to it right away, but it screwed up her latch for the *entire next day*.  I was really upset about this, thinking we had broken our perfectly-nursing baby.  Fortunately, the following day she was fine and we haven't tried a paci since.


But it would be nice if TJ could feed her occasionally, *and* she's going to need to take a bottle when I go back to work in March.   Which means I need to start pumping anyway, so that we can stockpile milk.  Blergh.

=============================================

Not bad for the first few weeks, though.  Fingers crossed that the relative peacefulness and Baby Good Sleep will last!

Brown paper packages tied up with string

Our days are fragmented by the schedules of our two little people.  T has to be at preschool exactly at 8:40 and picked up at 12:40.  M eats approximately every 3-5 hours round the clock, which also includes one or more diaper changes and some extra cuddling when she just doesn't want to be put down.  

We have doctor's appointments for M, T, and me, as well as errands like prescription pickup and grocery shopping.  I can't drive until I stop taking pain meds.  I can't stop taking pain meds until it stops hurting.  So we do everything, "all four together", which is kind of nice, but also means neither adult can "tag out".

Not unexpected, and thankfully being on maternity leave frees me up to think about nothing else than what's going on here at home.  Our second time with a newborn has been easier, mainly because my expectations of "getting things done" are low.  And this one sleeps and eats better than I expected (sleep gods, don't strike me down).



gratuitous baby picture.  blanket knit by my mom!

While I was thinking about not much else besides our day-to-day routine, two awesome things happened.

Today I got email from a BlogHer editor telling me they are featuring one of my older posts about contentment on their front page.  Woot!  I still love me some external validation.

 But even bigger and MORE exciting than that was an email I got last night as I was trying to convince myself to spend a little time in the craft room before falling into bed. 

Create magazine, part of the gorgeous Northridge Publishing family, wants to publish a project I submitted!!  I sent in the photos months ago, but since I hadn't heard from them, I figured they didn't want it.  I was a little sad, but honestly, not surprised since this was the first mini scrapbook album I've made on my own. 

But they want to publish it in March!  I need to send it in this month, with some additional info.  This is one of the items on my Mondo Beyondo list.  I honestly was going to give up on this one, partly because of the lack of time I have right now to focus on crafting, but also because of some customer service issues I've been having with Northridge regarding my subscription.

But when I got the email requesting my project, I just couldn't say no.  It's on my dream list!  The album itself is very special to me - it's a list of all the qualities I want to have as a mama, kind of a scrapbook version of a "vision board".  So you can be sure I'll be taking a ton of photos of it just in case it doesn't come back to me.

So to quote John Lennon, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

Update:  One more awesome thing I forgot to mention - BabyM weighs 7lbs today, which is 3 oz more than her birthweight.  Which also means we don't need to wake her to eat.  Woohoo!

Now your turn.  Tell me about an unexpected good thing in your life!

To (co)sleep, perchance to dream

Prior to having a child, I had these dreams of being a super crunchy (but vaccinating!) granola mama who coslept with her baby in this awesome "family bed". I imagined lazy mornings where we were all snuggly and stayed in our PJs till noon.

Um, yeah. Well, I guess the last part was true because I couldn't find the time or energy to get dressed in the morning with a newborn. But the family bed thing never happened.

I bought one of those Snuggle Nest things for our bed, but we quickly realized it took up too much space, and it made my new mama light-sleep even worse to have the baby RIGHT THERE. TJ also didn't sleep well with her in our bed, and I think we were both scared of rolling or jostling the cosleeper. Without it, we were even more worried about her getting squished or stuck under the blankets, etc.

Not to mention The Baby only liked to sleep in her vibrating bouncy seat for most of the first couple of months. So we finally just put that bouncy seat in her crib so she could sleep there at the foot of our bed. After she outgrew the bouncy seat, she slept just fine in her crib and waking up to happy baby noises was actually pretty awesome.

So we continued that way for 13 months, when we finally moved her crib down to her room. She's been a pretty great sleeper, for the most part, with some notable regressions, so we don't mess with The System.

After our Ireland trip, we moved her into her own Big Girl Bed, and she sleeps even better there (mostly). So I've given up the dream of cosleeping.

Until we went to Portland for the weekend. She is too big for a Pack N Play and our hotel room had just one king sized bed, with plenty of room for both of us.
She slept great snuggled under all those blankets. Me, not so much. I woke up to find her feet in my belly, her feet on my face (seriously?!), and tiny hands on my cheeks, with her face two inches above mine, asking "are you awake, mama?" In fact, I was not, until just then. But it was fun for the weekend.

Long term, I am just fine with our non-co-sleeping arrangement! We'll see what Baby X' has in store for us.

Jet Lag and Toddler Sleep

My eyes popped open at 3:22am today, and I spent the next hour in bed trying to go back to sleep with no success.  Hello,  jet lag.  After all, it's noon in Ireland. 

I was confused by this, because I only went to bed at 9:45pm last night.  And I'm a high sleep need person - 9 or 10 hours is that sweet spot for me.  So by all accounts, I should still be asleep.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is when I had my epiphany.  One that the rest of you experienced parents are probably well-acquainted with, and will read this and say "duh, of course!".

Sleep isn't just about the sheer number of hours needed.  This is true for me, and also explains the crazy sleep of toddlers.  (Not to mention jet-lagged toddlers!)  I think there's a point where your body just decides it's time to wake up, and no amount of "trying" to get back to sleep will override that.

T woke up yesterday around 4am, and I listened to her sing and talk on the baby monitor for an hour, hoping she'd go back to sleep.  After all, she only went to bed at 10pm, thanks to a monster nap in the afternoon.  She had only gotten 6 hours of sleep, which is nowhere near the 11-12 hours she usually needs.

But, like my own jet-lagged self who had been up since 3:30am, something told her it was time to wake up.  It wasn't light out yet.  No loud noises woke her.  She hadn't had "enough" sleep.  It was just time.

I haven't looked at the research (too lazy and tired) but vaguely remember there are "internal clock" proteins that determine asleep/awake stuff.  If you have details, I'd love to hear them!

A wise friend told me, when T was very small, that there are a few common power struggles between kids and parents.  One of them is sleep, and as she told me, "you can't make your kid sleep".  I've tried to keep that in mind when we've been frustrated by T's occasional schedule blips. 

I guess I should feel lucky that it took me so long to figure this out.  T has been a surprisingly good sleeper since we brought her home 2.5 years ago, with a few notable regressions.  But it took her a good 2 weeks to get on a schedule when we went to Ireland, and I suspect it'll be the same, or longer to get back to it here.

For now, we're handling it by letting her sleep during the day when she needs to (she's actually TOLD US she needs to go take a nap!) but waking her after 3 hours if needed.  We've been putting her to bed about 5 hours after she gets up from her last nap.  Yesterday she went to sleep around 6:15pm and she's still sleeping now at 5am, so I have high hopes that today will be more "normal".

But man, I am glad that this bout of jet lag is going to save me (a little) from agonizing over her sleep -  "But she should be tired...She only got x hours of sleep last night...Why isn't she napping?!"

One more mama lesson learned.

Two year sleep regression is kicking my butt

Arghhhh.  Just when I thought we were over the obsession with baby sleep.  T has been sleeping more crappily than usual for the last couple of months.  We're back to the voodoo of precisely timing naps and bedtime and trying to figure out the secret to keeping her asleep all night and not waking up at dark:thirty.  Today's wakeup time was 5am.  So delightful. 

I think the whole mess started with her switching to a new class at daycare last month.  She will not nap for more than 90 minutes there, and sometimes not more than an hour.  So by the time she gets home, she's a hot mess.

Moving bedtime WAY up worked well for a little while.  We started putting her down by 6-6:15pm.  And that helps her get caught up, and back to her usuall 11 hours at night, and then we can usually guarantee a 2+ hour nap for her the next day when she's home with me.  But another day at daycare and BAM! she's on her wack schedule again.

I wake up at the slightest whimper from the baby monitor and now I've apparently developed the inability to get right back to sleep.  I think having a kid has completely ruined that for me.  I don't sleep as well anymore.  (And certainly not as long, sigh.) 

I thought she was just having issues adjusting to the new class at school - she only goes twice a week so I figured it would take her a while to settle in.  But it turns out, the 2 year sleep regression is a real thing.  I knew I could count on AskMoxie...

So here I am, at 1am, catching up on my Mondo Beyondo lessons.  On the bright side, I won't be as ridiculously behind anymore.  And once I do get to sleep, I'll get to enjoy our fabulous new memory foam mattress.  So all is not lost.

Can't sleep at night I just toss and turn

I realized this morning that in the past 3.5 months, I've only had about 5 nights of uninterrupted sleep (7 hours or more). And I'm not a complete mess, surprisingly. I think it's the combination of the Vitamin D supplements I'm taking and the fact that BabyT does sleep in until about 8:30 or 9am, though she gets up 2-4 times to eat through the night.

It also helps that My Awesome Husband(tm) takes the night feeding on Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights so at least I don't have to do anything when BabyT wakes, and I can get back to sleep relatively quickly. (Because I have not yet developed the ability to sleep through baby crying.)

I suppose this is karma and the universe righting itself after giving us a baby who slept through the night (12 hours!) around 9 weeks, and who slept 4-6 hour stretches from the very beginning. I'm still very grateful for that because it allowed me to recover from the birth and sort out the breastfeeding business without being too much of a zombie. Plus I got a LOT of Etsy orders made last Christmas, thanks to our baby's amazing sleep schedule.

Now, not so much. I was starting to get that crazy stressed feeling, and realized it was the combo of work + broken sleep + Etsy orders (more work!) + trying to keep our house in reasonable shape + being a good mama to BabyT when she was awake. Something had to give, and sadly it was Etsy. I didn't want to feel like my craft was becoming an obligation so I've decided to just stick with selling things I've already got made, until I'm getting better sleep and work is less crazy.

And work. Sigh. I do love my team and my job, but my awesome friend Michelle who was doing my job while I was out on maternity leave, then sharing my job when I came back part-time, is away for 100 days (!) on a mandatory break as part of my company's rules for contract workers. So I'm trying to do a roughly 50-60 hour a week job in 25 hours.

As you can imagine, that's not really going well, because I don't have a Time Extending Device. I'm also a Type A perfectionist about work, so it's hard for me to not do *everything* at 110%. Which isn't exactly possible in half-time. So I'm learning to prioritize and really figure out what needs to be done NOW, and what could possibly wait until I have some breathing room.

I'm also learning how to compartmentalize so that I'm not doing work all day on my days off, in between taking care of BabyT. Sure, while she's down for a 2 hour nap, I can squeeze in a glance at my email or get a few short tasks done, but I don't want to plunk her down with her toys while I spend hours on conference calls, etc. Obviously, at times that's unavoidable, but in general it defeats the purpose of me staying home with her.

So of course, it's a work in progress, but I'm learning. As per ZenHabits, I've started making a "Most Important Tasks" list each day with only 3 items on it, and I make sure I get those done. Anything else is gravy. But getting those three tasks done makes me feel like I've accomplished *something* on these crazy fragmented days.

Other mamas out there, how do you deal with those competing priorities? What are your time management/sanity tips?

No more tears

Just back from another successful trip to the grocery store with BabyT. So far I've only ventured to Safeway because I *know* their carts fit the infant seat securely. Odd, the things you have to consider when you've got to take your baby places. I'm also a lot more sensitive to what people in wheelchairs need to go through - when I've got the stroller, I've got to find the path that has no stairs, or the dip in the curb, a place that's wide enough for me to pass, etc.

But anyway, I am planning to make chicken tortellini stew in the slow cooker. The chili did turn out well, and it is nice to just dump everything in and leave it to cook, as long as I've planned ahead. Unfortunately I need to substitute a leek (leek!leek!leek! - that's the noise they make) for the fennel I didn't find at the grocery. Not sure how that's going to work.

We also discovered over the past couple of days that our baby NEEDS her routine, and does not like disruption. Not surprising, since TJ and I are both pretty sensitive to changes in our day to day schedules. We have spent a few wretched nights trying to get her to sleep for the night, with multiple attempts and lots of yelling (on her part). She'd sleep for 20 min, or an hour, then wake up screaming again. This, I'm pretty sure, is a direct result of us disrupting her bedtime on Tuesday to go out to dinner with John, Jenna, and Ella, and my lunch out with Aimee yesterday (which shot her afternoon naps completely to hell).

So we paid for it, and now we've learned our lesson. Sadly, I think our days of "porta-baby" are over. I think outings now have to happen right after she wakes up and then we need to get home in time for the next nap (or at least very shortly thereafter). Sigh. I'll just add that to the long list of things that are different now.

But on the bright side, following her schedule really REALLY pays off. We get lots of smiles, she wakes up quietly and just makes baby sounds in her crib until one of us picks her up, and she's alert and happy to play with toys by herself. So it's not completely thankless.

Here's a picture of Gorgeous Bean playing with Jacques the Peacock, her Christmas present from her Great-Aunt Susie:

I have no gift to bring

Busy couple of days for us at the Creath House! On Tuesday, BabyT and I drove the 44 miles to my friend Wendi's house, where we spent the afternoon with her and her 13-month-old little guy M. It allowed T to get a good nap in the car (she slept nearly the whole way there and back) so it worked out pretty well. She also napped in the restaurant while I had my first sushi since she was born. Yippee!!

We haven't fared so well in the past two days. On Xmas eve, she was woken up at 6am by one of the dogs, I think, and started her day yelling. (Usually when she wakes up on her own, she's mellow and alert and makes baby noises to herself in the crib until I wake up and notice her. She's also usually staring at me through the crib bars, and smiles when I make eye contact. A nice way to wake up, huh? But when she's unexpectedly woken up by a hungry dog at 6am, she is NOT pleased. (Truth be told, neither am I.)

And then, the lady that cleans our house was here, so BabyT had to take her morning nap in the swing, which isn't standard. But on the bright side, I got to watch "Rabbitproof Fence" finally, which we've had from Netflix for WEEKS. Of course it wasn't a cheerful Xmas movie, and thoroughly depressed me, but it was good.

We went out to lunch at Red Robin because TJ was craving their teriyaki chicken sandwich. Normally I'm not a fan of RR (too many screaming kids and it smells like dirty wet dishtowels) but since he had a craving, I agreed to go there. Plus the one at Redmond Town Center is slightly less annoying and smelly. BabyT did ok there but stayed wide awake. We then took her to the dog park, where she slept for a few minutes here and there, but didn't get a good nap.

And of course, in the evening it took us 3 tries and FOREVER to get her to sleep for the night. In her usual cooperative way, once she fell asleep for good, she did stay asleep *all night* but we spent a good 2.5 hours getting to that point.

Yesterday we went over to TJ's aunt and uncle's place for Christmas brunch. Which meant that BabyT didn't get her usual morning nap. She got about 30 min in the car (no traffic!) and then slept a little in the Sleepy Wrap while we were there, but in general, her chi had been disrupted. And again we had a bit of a challenge getting her to bed, but fortunately she went to sleep a little earlier.

And then she slept until 8:30 this morning, so woo hoo! Today's nap situation has been not so great (30 min tops, eating every 1.5 hours, and we're on the 3rd nap of the day). I'm hoping after a couple of days of our "normal" schedule, she'll get back to the usual 45 min - 1.5 hour naps. I know it's our fault for messing with a good thing, but sometimes we have to leave the house!

And as much as I hate the arrogant tone of Dr. W in "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child", I do think some of his ideas are spot-on. Like getting better sleep during the day leads to better sleep at night, and that putting the baby down earlier leads to her sleeping later. And maybe even (at least for our baby) that sleep in a stroller/car/swing isn't as good as non-motion sleep. I know other babies that can *only* sleep in their swings, though, so people have to do what works. Apparently it doesn't work for us.

And as if on cue, BabyT is fussing again. Sigh. I am surely paying for my schedule-disruption. She gets that from both of her parents, for sure. Wish us luck in getting back on track :)

Sleep with one eye open

OK, I give up. Since I've been home now for nearly 10 weeks with BabyT, I really don't have much of a non-baby-related life to write about. So excuse my descent into "all baby, all the time" posting. Sigh. I didn't want to become *that* person. I'll try not to be that annoying in person. At least with the blog, you can choose not to read it.

T is a pretty mellow baby (and I knock on wood every time I say this!), and we've been grateful. Around 4 weeks, she started the Period of Evening Wretchedness, which started around 7 and ended at 9 or 10 when she'd go to sleep. This is pretty common, it seems, and is known as the newborn "witching hour". Fortunately, she'd only get this way about 50% of evenings or less, so I did think it might be something we were doing/not doing to cause this.

Having been trained as scientists and engineers, TJ and I naturally look for cause/effect and solutions. I'm thinking this doesn't always work with babies - they seem to have their own reasons for doing thing, not all of which are easily discernible or predictable.

Anyway, the Evening Wretchedness was supposed to peak around 6-8 weeks and get better after that. I sort of noticed that she seemed to be fussy on days where she didn't sleep much during the day, but wasn't really tracking sleep vs. wretchedness.

Until last week, when we had a particularly awful day where BabyT napped for 1 hour the entire day, had a long period of Evening Wretchedness and then woke up twice at night. Except for her first 2 weeks at home, she *never* woke up more than once to eat at night. That was a bad night for us, and a bad next day for me. (I do not handle limited sleep very well.)

So I put out a request to my "Caltech alumni parents" mailing list to find out what other people did regarding naps and tiny babies since all the "expert advice" seems to say not to do anything with a schedule for 3-4 months.

I got some good information back, most notably, that if I get her to sleep more during the day, she'll sleep more at night and that if we put her to bed earlier she'd probably sleep longer at night as well. The biggest thing was to look for her "tired signs" like eye-rubbing, baby zombie eye, and yawning and then try to put her in the crib.

So for the past 4-5 days, I've been tracking her sleep on my handy iPod, using the awesome TotalBaby application, to see if there are any patterns. We've also been trying to get her to sleep before 9:30pm, and during the day, I try to get her to nap if she's been awake for 3 hours.

And OMG. I thought our girl was sleeping great already - 7 hours of sleep a night, plus another nap of 2-3 hours in the morning is pretty awesome at 9 weeks, and she's been doing that for a few weeks now, waking up to eat once about 50% of the nights. We thought we had won the baby lottery. (I'm sure that we have.) So I was skeptical that we could really make things better, though I was really hoping to avoid tired Evening Wretchedness.

Guess what, for the past four nights, she slept 10-11 hours and didn't wake up to eat(!!!) Of course, babies are unpredictable and things will change, but this is amazing. She also takes about 3-ish naps during the day, for 45 min to 2 hours. And there has been no Wretchedness.

But of course, this is a work in progress. Today she and I went out to Redmond Town Center, an outdoor mall, that also has a nice walking trail behind it. We started our walk on the trail and then walked for a while in the mall portion. She napped on and off in the stroller, but I think that threw off her sleeping chi.

Once we got home, she alternated eating and sleeping for the next couple of hours, and it has been pretty difficult to get her to sleep. Here we are around 10pm, and I think she just fell asleep. So it remains to be seen what happens tonight. I've got my fingers crossed that it'll be an uneventful night, and that she might even get 10 hours of sleep, but who knows? These babies, so unpredictable!

And of course, another cute baby picture. Baby Eeyore is sometimes happy!



We got this outfit in the giant bag of baby clothes I bought from someone on Craigslist. I wish I had remembered it at Halloween, but with a baby, it's never too late to play dress-up!