SLEEPING:
Well, after the whole sleep issue at the beginning of the month things settled down into a different pattern. J started taking 4 1 hour naps during the day, still getting up 2-3 times during the night. After putting her in a moses basket in the laundry room for naps for a week or so (she just settled down better in there), Dominic recorded the dryer and we now have a dryer cd she listens to while she sleeps. I don't know what it is about that dryer, but it still works like magic for her :)
This was a very hard schedule for me to adjust to as I wasn't getting good sleep at night and finding myself with very short increments of time during the day to get things done. I don't know if the fragmented sleep thing was just really getting to me or what, but I was started to get really delirious at night - sometimes at 3am, I wouldn't know if I'd been up once already or 5 times! By the early morning hours, I started just holding her and we'd both sleep. I was just too tired to do anything else. While not the best solution, it was the only solution I could think of at the time. Everything else required too much effort.
J's new sleeping schedule also means shes up for longer periods of time which is fun. So, while the old routine was up for 1 hr, sleep for 2.5 hrs, the new routine is up for 1.5-2 hrs, sleep for 1 hr.
The past 4 nights have been INCREDIBLE. J has slept approximately 7 hrs, eaten, and gone back to bed for another 4 hrs. Amazing! Of course the first 3 nights, I woke up thinking she'd stopped breathing and couldn't go back to sleep (even after checking on her). It's like my body is used to getting up or something ... I realized this morning that her night sleep straightened out about 3 months after her due date. So, moms out there with early babies - hang in there. Those days and weeks make a difference! Not that I think she's going to sleep through the night from now until forever, but I'm still thankful for 4 decent nights sleep!
EATING:
I swear J's 3 month growth spurt lasted half the month as I felt like I was feeding her all the time and everything (eating and sleeping) was all out of whack. But, she's gotten back to a normal schedule (I hate to use this word) eating every 3 hrs or so. In the midst of the mess, I seriously wondered if something was wrong, but am glad I didn't obsess too much as apparently she was just getting her new routine all figured out for herself.
We hadn't been very consistent over the last 1.5 months about giving J a bottle and when we tried a couple weeks ago, she very politely said "no thanks" with lots and lots of screaming. I know people say that babies will get hungry enough and eventually take a bottle, but I'm not to that point. I haven't lost hope and am going to keep trying, so we'll see how that goes.
THE THINGS BABIES DO:
It's hard to believe that in the last month J has gone from just starting to smile at us consistently (right around 3 months) to giggling, pulling up to a seated position when you hold her hands, smiling at herself in the mirror, talking a bunch of nonsense to anyone who will listen, grabbing toys and putting them in her mouth, and ALMOST rolling over. She's close on the last one, but not quite there. Tummy time is not her fave.
OTHER CHANGES:
Well, the going back to work thing didn't work out quite as well as we'd hoped SO I'm staying home with J. She's my boss as of Oct 1. It's going well. I'll write more about this later as I already feel that this post is long.
Pics from the last month:
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| From four months old |
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