A-Day!

Katy went to A-Day today with Mommy, Daddy, Grammy, G-Pop, and Aunt Anna. We went to the petting zoo, walked around the Del-Val campus, and wandered around the craft show. Here are the pics!

Grammy and Anna!

Went to dinner tonight at Grammy and G-Pop's, and, as a special treat, Aunt Anna was there!

Blocks!

Katy opened her big box of blocks that she got from Mommy and Daddy on Christmas this morning. Here are the pics!

Hammock Time

Katy played with G-Pop in the hammock today. Here are the pics!

Some cute pics

I won't talk about you-know-what. I just want to show you some cute pics.

This is Katy's lovey. Does anyone remember who gave this bear to us? Whoever it was, thank you. Katy likes to hold this bear when she's falling asl --- oops, I wasn't going to talk about that. Well, she really likes the bear, let's just leave it at that.

Fun with a peanut butter jar lid. Katy spent a good 20 minutes with this lid, placing it carefully on the floor in front of her briefly, then chewing on it, then placing it back on the floor, then chewing. I wish I knew what was going through her head as she did this.

Nappy Napperton

If you are tired of reading what Zach refers to as my "uni-bomber-esque posts" regarding the Sleep Saga, skip to the next paragraph. Yesterday we learned the disaster that can result from being off the nap schedule. We had a La Leche League meeting at 10, and so instead of going down for her nap at 10:30, she was awake until noon, and fell asleep in the carseat on the way home. This was a short-lived nap, and I tried to get her to sleep in her crib before she woke up entirely, but after a half-hour of screaming, and ignoring my attempts to calm her, she was wide awake, so I got her out of the crib. We tried another nap around 3:30, but again, it was just a lot of crying and no sleeping, so I gave up only because I needed to get downstairs and finish planning my lesson that I was teaching last night. So, basically NO nap at all, ALL day long. I left for class at 6. Zach says Katy was asleep by 6:30, and she woke up at 9! (Finally, some free-time for Zach!) So, when I got home at 9:45 wanting desperately to go to bed, Katy had basically just woken up from a long nap. Luckily, though, she was still fairly tired, and was sound asleep by 11. She had a great night of sleep, waking only once - around 2:30. Today we tried getting back on the schedule - we started the naptime routine at 10:15 - reading, nursing, rocking, getting in the crib (just Katy, not me), singing, shushing, patting. She fell asleep at 10:55. Let's hope this nap lasts for a good hour or so.

In other news, we got a king-sized bed and bedroom set! It took me a few days to get over how absurdly large the bed is, but after a few nights of extra space and the nice firm mattress, not to mention the foot-board, I am convinced that we made the right choice. Here it is:

Katy enjoyed playing with the box that the mattress pad came in. It made a great teether.

Okay, come on Mom, just take the picture so I can get back to playing with the box.
Wait, what are those pink things in the box? Oh right, my legs!! I knew I'd seen them somewhere before.

And some amusing pet stories. First off, Shelby, Mr. All-About Me. We are trying to get Katy to crawl (although I realize we should not be so anxious), so we often sit a few feet away from her and say "Come on, honey, come on!" Shelby assumes that we are calling him, since we use the same tone when we call him, so gets up (grudgingly!) from his dog bed in the other room and comes over to us, as if to say "What now?" Then it's hard to get him to go lay back down. Here I've captured his misunderstanding on film.

And then this morning, I was putting back a few letters in Katy's foam alphabet puzzle mat, and I discovered that the O had absolutely vanished. I gave up looking for it, assuming it would surface eventually. As I stepped out of the shower a while later, I caught a glimpse of Miss Jane sneaking down the stairs with the O in her mouth! I thought she might have it caught on her teeth, so I ran downstairs after her, only to find her in the playroom, sitting possessively atop the O. I guess kitties can have loveys too.

Musings on sleep

WARNING: This post is like a diary entry. Only read it if you're REALLY interested in the trials and tribulations of baby sleep. I'm posting it for all to see because I think one of the most interesting ways to learn and adapt parenting techniques is to hear first-hand from other parents' good and bad experiences. There is a whole lot of BAD in here, and a little bit of GOOD! I am not trying to give anyone advice here - I just want to share my story. Everyone has to do things their own way, so those of you who are also struggling with baby sleep issues (most of my friends!), I do not mean to come off as didactic. I also want to write this as a record of what I am hoping is a watershed moment in our household.

Okay, if you're a mom, you know what a sensitive subject sleep can be when you're parenting a baby. Everyone has their own philosophy, and is somewhere on the wide spectrum between "Baby should sleep without my help from day one" and "Baby can sleep on my chest until she's thirty." I have always tended more toward the latter. I held Katy for most of her naps in the early months, and then found that she napped great in her carseat. We've co-slept with her ever since about 4 months of age. Everyone was sleeping great, and things were lovely.

But she's too mobile to be napping in her carseat now, and I'm also tired of lugging the darn thing inside. It's time for her to learn to nap by herself on a flat surface, like, say, for instance, I don't know, maybe... her crib? It's been collecting dust for months in our bedroom, and is a pain to move, so a few weeks ago, I set up Katy's pack-and-play in her bedroom as a temporary crib (until we could find time to move the real crib downstairs) and began trying to get her to nap there. Well, that was the start of a long saga that has completely absorbed me for weeks now.

I have been (and still am) uncomfortable with Cry-It-Out, even though I know that some swear by it. I know it works for some, but it's not for us. So, for weeks, I've been nursing her to sleep and trying to gently lay her down in the pack-and-play. The longest nap I've gotten out of this method is 20 minutes, and after 3 weeks, it's not improving at all. I followed the advice of Elizabeth Pantley in the No Cry Sleep Solution, which suggests staying nearby the baby and shushing her to sleep if she wakes, just to get that nap to last longer in hopes of working regular naps into baby's biorhythmic clock. I have been doing this religiously, and it's just not working for us. I love the theory, and I have the utmost respect for Ms. Pantley for devising a sleep plan that doesn't involve crying, but this has just not been working for us.

Not to mention the havoc that her non-napping has wreaked on our nighttime sleep. We've been trying to break the suck-to-sleep association by gently unlatching when she's groggy (also from Ms. Pantley), and that HAS been working. Or at least, she has learned to fall asleep right after being unlatched. But she hasn't been staying asleep for long. Sometimes 45 minutes, sometimes 3 hours, but when she awakes, there are only 2 ways to get her back to sleep: nursing again or laying on my chest and getting back-pats and shushes. If I try just snuggling her lying next to her, or singing, she just gets louder and louder with her crying. This doesn't really work when Daddy needs to get up and go to work in a few short hours. Sadly, he has had to go sleep elsewhere a time or two.

Last night, we moved the crib downstairs to Katy's bedroom, and she took an evening nap of 35 minutes! Impressive. Zach attributes this to the crib being more comfortable than the pack-and-play. I was convinced it wouldn't make that much difference, but I think he might be right, as you will see.

So. Today a friend explained to me how she got her daughter to learn to sleep independently after being a co-sleeper. She put her in her crib groggy, and patted her and shushed her and stayed with her until she fell asleep, even though the baby was crying, and even though it might take an hour. After a few nights of that, she stayed with her baby, but a few feet away. Every few nights, she'd move further toward the door of the room, always staying and shushing until the baby fell asleep. After about 10 days, she was able to put the baby down and walk out of the room. My friend believes there's a big difference between letting the baby cry while you're there, touching her, talking to her, being there for her... and letting her cry alone.

After playgroup, I was not yet brave enough to try letting her cry, so I nursed her to sleep and put her in her crib (on her back). She slept for an HOUR and 5 minutes! This might seem like no big deal to some, but after what we've been through with 20 minute naps and trying to get her to sleep longer, this was a miracle. What was the difference? Only that she was on the comfy crib mattress instead of the lame pack-and-play board mattress. One point for Daddy.

After such success with nap #1 today, I got brave and decided to try what my friend suggested. I nursed Katy until she was groggy, put her in her crib and played her mobile, sitting in a chair right next to her and shushing her. She started crying, and I tried to quiet her for 10 minutes without picking her up, but she ended up getting REALLY upset, so I picked her up. (Sucker.) I rocked her until she got sleepy again, and then I put her back in - this time on her tummy. I know, I know you're not supposed to do that, but she is definitely strong enough to lift her head up at 8 months, so I'm not concerned. She often flips herself over to her tummy in her sleep anyway, so I figure it's safe. She cried for about 5 minutes as I patted her back and shushed her. I've been singing the ABCs to her as her sleepy song, so I sang that. She was still crying. So I switched to our old stand-by from the newborn days: Where is Thumbkin. Well, boy, did that ever do the trick. She stopped crying, listened to me sing, and after 2 rounds, was out like a light! That was an hour ago and counting!!!! (She did start crying once as I've been writing this, but the same patting and singing put her straight back to sleep without being picked up!)

So what I've learned is that listening to my baby cry is not nearly so hard if I'm touching her, singing to her, as I would imagine it would be if I were in another room. I've also learned that tummy sleep ROCKS (for older babies, who can move around well). And I learned that if your sleepy song ain't broke, don't fix it!

If you read all that, kudos to you. I hope it entertained you. It has certainly kept my attention for the past few weeks, and I'm overjoyed to be experiencing some success, even if just for one day.

To reward you for your time, here's a cute pic of the Kate-ster eating avocado today.

My most recent WIP

WIP in the knitting world means "Work In Progress." This was supposed to be done by now, but last night I had to give Anna (my sister-in-law) a half-finished laptop bag for her birthday. Sad, right? I also gave my Dad ONE sock for his birthday. This is getting ridiculous. I just can't find the time to knit since I started working, albeit only 3 hours a week.


Here's the bag, which I hope to finish in the next week or so. I just need to finish the strap, the other side panel, felt it, and sew in a zipper.


Katy is practicing her crawling. She's still not moving forward, but she gets up on her hands and knees and rocks, which seems promising. Her sleeping is still unpredictable. Her naps yesterday were atrocious, and last night, after she fell asleep, she kept crying in her sleep. It's so weird. I hear that kids are often cranky right before making a major breakthrough, so maybe it has to do with how she's about to crawl. But she's super sweet and happy during the day, so.... Who knows?