After a lot of deliberation I ended up buying the Britax Boulevard for her main carseat, the MyRide will be going in Den’s car. These kind of decisions stress me out so I’m really hoping she and I like the Boulevard as much as it seemed when we tried them in the store. Fingers crossed. And yes, I am super sad about letting go of the uber cute MyRide. I just feel like since we’re in the car every day for a while that some more padding and features would be nice.

::

Someone – and I have no freaking clue who, my memory sucks right now – informed me that Kate is right around the time for another one of those wonderweeks. I think I fucking hate wonder weeks. I know I fucking hate teething. At this point I can’t even tell you exactly what is bothering her, I just know that she refuses to sleep until she’s so tired she passes out. I even take her in the bedroom and turn off the lights and she’s starting to cry in protest and starts climbing my chest and trying to fling herself backwards out of my arms. Now my child has never slept through the night, she never stays asleep, but getting her to sleep was never a problem. I don’t have any particular routine, I don’t rock her, I normally just wait until she rubs her eyes, walk her into her room, lay down with her, sometimes I nurse her sometimes I don’t (but it helps), and she falls asleep. It takes me 2 minutes. This? This screechy angry crawling away from me child? This is crazy. It is making me crazy.

I just remind myself that it’s just one of those weeks and next week will probably be better. I kind of feel bad for my friends and relatives on facebook because almost all of my posts are about how she is not sleeping. My entire life revolves around my child’s lack of naps. It’s awesome.

::

Last night I actually managed to get Kate down to sleep at a somewhat normal time of 9pm. It was a tricky operation, mostly involving her getting so tired she cried pitifully until I rocked her to sleep and very very carefully put her down on her bed. As I tip-toed out of her room Den whispered something to me.

I quietly shut her door and then took a step down the hall, whispering back, “What? I couldn’t hear–” *BA-WHAM!!* Not watching where I was stepping I friggin kicked her monkey ball right into the bathroom door. I just stood there, motionless, shoulders slumped. I mean, seriously?

By some miracle she did not wake up. At least, not right then. She slept a whole 30 minutes before waking up screaming. At least it wasn’t my fault.

::

Warning: Cloth diaper babble.

I’ve been having problems with Kate’s Thirsties diapers leaking, which had me wondering if either she was outgrowing them (finally), or if the elastics were starting to go. Considering we have 7 Thirsties covers and used them pretty much exclusively, I wouldn’t be surprized. So I pulled out the small FuzziBunz I’d packed away months ago (because of leaks) and stripped them with dawn. They still fit her and they no longer leak. I am super excited! I also bought two GroVia AIO one-size dipes, which may not be my preferred type of diaper but the prints are super cute. And in my world, cute almost always wins. (Why don’t GroVia’s AI2s have the same side-snaps as the AIOs? This irritates me. I love the side snap.) I am now searching for some other pockets to try, especially anything with cute prints. I’m looking for snaps because someone has been pulling at her clothes and diapers and I have a feeling she’ll be taking the velcro ones off soon. I plan to buy some more hemp inserts too… I’m currently using the Thirsties duo inserts in them, which work fine but since I don’t need the stay-dry inside a pocket I could get away with just hemp and be much trimmer.

Any suggestions welcome.

I’ve written about eyes before. I get emotional, waiting and hoping for my blue-eyed child. And I feel so guilty for that, guilty that I am disappointed in anything at all. It’s the one struggle that I can’t seem to let go of. I have spent the past 10 months staring at Kate’s grey eyes, knowing they weren’t going to turn blue but hoping they would at least stay grey. When they started turning brown I kept trying to convince myself it was the light. It wasn’t – they clearly were turning a brown hue. I was trying to just accept that, she is who she is and I need to let it go.

The other day I studied her eyes by habit and realized with a shock that they have green in them. Green. I had to look three times and I keep asking people if they see it too, because I was sure I was imagining it. They keep confirming that her eyes are in fact a grey-olive tone now. Definitely brown in there, but also a green tint. So unexpected. Yes I know that your children can end up with pretty much any color eyes under the sun, no matter what you have, but we all just figured brown (Den’s) or blue (mine).

I admit, I feel a rush of relief. Green! I can handle green. It’s not blue, but green feels unique and very… Kate. Who knows what color they’ll actually end up, maybe hazel or grey/brown/green. It sure is interesting watching them change.

10 Months

8 Months

4 Months

2 Months

I seriously think I hate carseats at this point. I want to go to every company that makes them and say, “You suck, you suck, you suck. You too. Yes you, you suck!” I have addled my brains researching every conceivable fact, comparing, and driving to BRU three times to try out the seats. And every single one of them has something wrong with it. (Correction: something I don’t like about it. It may be a good reason, it may be a totally stupid reason, but I want to like my carseats.)

The MyRide? Awesome rear-facing seat. I spent only $130 on it, it installed super easy with no issues whatsoever using a seatbelt (we can’t use LATCH in the center in the SUV), Kate fits, she seems happy. The harness was a little tight to snug up on her, but I hear that with a lot of different car seats, especially with rear-facing installs. It’s a little lacking in the cushiony department, but Kate didn’t seem to mind. The big but? It sucks forward facing, so we’d have to get a different seat in a few years. The seat doesn’t recline or have a base, it just has two little legs that pop out to prop it up a bit more for forward facing…. and trying to fit it into a seat with the base flat and have the back actually against the seat back? Not going to happen. I tried it, just to see. It’s a known issue, most people just don’t use it forward facing… if they even have the option. I can see why.

I looked at a lot of different seats. Tried them out in the store. Compared stats and reviews. I hemmed and I hawed and I decided in the end to spend the money on a Britax. I am being supremely picky about this, so I figured let’s spend the extra money to get THE car seat… the luxury edition. Nifty little velcro tabs to hold back the harness straps, lots of padding, a smooth harness adjuster, easy to install, etc etc. This was it. It was hard making that decision, but I hit the purchase button.

It arrived today. I was so freaking excited. I took it out, oooed and ahhhed over it, got it adjusted to Kate’s shoulders. Then I took the MyRide out of the SUV and set about installing the Boulevard. It wasn’t easy like everyone said. Maybe everyone was talking about LATCH. Because the seat belt? Just as hard as with the MyRide. In fact after I huffed and puffed and got it in nice and solid it was the wrong angle. And that’s when I noticed the Boulevard has no little bubble ball level meter, it just has a line on the side. The line shows the center of the allowable recline between 30 and 45%. Uhh. That’s… not helpful. I mean, it kind of gives you a rough idea, but I don’t know if I’m over 30% or not. I do know however that it was so upright I had trouble getting her in it, so I uninstalled the bugger and got a rolled-up towel. Wrestled with it again. Success! It was acceptable to me.

Kate was happily playing in the back of the SUV all this time, by the way. Apparently it’s like the perfect playpen back there; I threw a bunch of her toys back there with her and she waddled around and tossed things and smushed her face up against the window squealing in delight. The seat back was high enough it kept her contained. I’m thinking maybe I should eat my lunches out there. But I digress.

Pleased with my install and yet feeling rather miffed at how the love was just not coming yet I snagged Kate and put her in the seat. Your new seat, Kate! How exciting! I’m just going to buckle you in-…. “WAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!” The screech of rage. Yes, okay, the crotch buckle is a little bit closer than in the MyRide and the padding thicker, making it a tighter fit. But still, it’s all kushy and happy! Happy, Kate, happy! She did not see the happy.

Once the harness was nice and snug – which, by the way, was not as easy I was lead to believe it was going to be – and she had settled down from the rage-screeching I got in and drove around the block. She fell asleep. So clearly it’s not a terrible seat. The head wings made me feel much better about her sleeping, like she was all cuddled by the seat. I thought, well maybe she is just in a mood. She’s tired.

We went back out a few hours later to go meet up with some friends. More screeching as I buckled her in. And again I was huffing and tugging on that damn strap to get it tight. She was screeching as if I was doing it up way too tight, but when I checked the shoulders there was a ton of slack – way more than I’m used to. What? I removed all the optional padding (belly, shoulders, had already removed the infant insert thing). Same thing. I sulked the whole drive. She was mostly silent, except for random bursts of babble and every once in a while a grunt and annoyed whine as she tried to get out of the harness.

At this point I really want to crawl underneath my bed and never look at car seats again. I can return the Boulevard, which is indeed my first instinct – why keep an expensive seat if it’s no better than the cheap seat? But then I look up what to get instead and I’m back to square one. They all have something I don’t like. I’ve decided to keep the MyRide in my SUV, since I DO like it, and so does she. When it’s time to turn her forward facing I’ll probably get the Graco Nautilus (forward facing only, harness to high back booster to low back booster). What I want for Den’s car is a cheap (less than $150) seat that will keep her rear facing the same amount of time as the MyRide and yet will be able to be used forward facing and not need to be replaced. The Boulevard actually does meet that criteria. Den wants to keep it. I cringe at the thought of keeping the $240 seat as the backup.

It’s times like these that I really really wish I was the kind of person who could quickly take in the general facts, make a decision, and then just be happy with it and forget the rest. Bah.

First, go and read Tash’s post about a lovely new drug called Makena. She explains it so well.

A drug that has been successfully used to treat preterm labor for very little cost, mixed by pharmacies, is now going to be made by a big pharmaceutical company with FDA approval (under the Orphan Drug Act or somesuch). Big Pharma of course will be the only maker of this newly-FDA-approved drug. Instead of $20 per dose? Makena is going to be $1500 per dose. They’re trying to justify it, but I don’t see how it’s even possible to justify that.

All I can think is fucking assholes.

::

Today I used the My Ride to gauge my feelings for it compared to the Boulevard. Know what I discovered? I like it a lot more than I previously thought. Kate does, too. She’s still not a huge fan of actually being snugged into the harness, but I’m getting the idea that’s a toddler/age thing, not a seat thing. But the harness and buckles on that thing are just so much nicer to me! I can get her in and out much more quickly, and it doesn’t irritate me. It also apparently doesn’t bug Kate either, since she was babbling and grinning at me (except for the tightening it part). Plus it’s cuter.

Then when I came home I looked it up on Amazon just for shits and giggles. One of the girl patterned My Rides is on sale for $115. I said, “Screw that!” I filed for a product return for the Britax, printed out the shipping label, and wrestled that thing back into the box and slapped the shipping label on it. I’m getting another My Ride for Den’s car. And if it totally sucks forward facing in a few years I’ll replace them with a Graco Nautilus. Combined it’s the same price as the Britax. So there. Done.

I feel so much better now.

::

When at 6pm the husband astutely notes that the baby looks really tired the correct answer would be make her stay awake by all means necessary. The wrong answer is putting her down for a nap. And then not waking her up for 2 hours. Because now? It is 11pm and she is walking circles around my chair, whinily demanding I come play with her, while at the same time resisting every attempt to put her to sleep (read: screaming like an angry raptor). She’s not even particularly tired. My dearest husband, on the other hand, basically fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, so I’m stuck with the awake, unhappy child by myself. Fantastic. I don’t know what I was thinking.

12:30 and I finally got her to fall asleep… and it was a good half an hour of me rocking and patting her in the dark of her bedroom.

::

Suddenly I noticed that her head is bumping the underside of my desk when she’s walking around. She had half an inch of clearance last week (okay maybe not that much, but she wasn’t close). She’s going to be really ticked off when she whacks her head with the next growth spurt. She already can’t walk underneath our dining table and she’s constantly getting “stuck” and crying because she doesn’t know how to duck, so she just repeatedly tries to walk forward and gets her forehead bonked every time.

Just this week she’s figured out how to put the balls back in her gumball machine. (It was a free toy. Balls go in the top, you press a lever, it plays a song, and out pops a ball.) She figured out the “out” part really quickly, I just had to sit there constantly putting them back in for her. This week she is deliberately picking up the ball and dropping it in the top, the pressing the lever and watching it come out the bottom. It feels like such a leap in understanding, moreso than just a coordination thing. She used to hit the lever until all the balls came out and then keep pressing it and get confused, like she thought there should be a magical limitless supply of balls. Now when she presses the lever and no ball comes out she immediately looks around for a ball to put in the top.

She is climbing and exploring. Her walking is picking up speed, which means she can get further away from me in a shorter amount of time. Good luck setting her down while I try to do something foolish like set up her travel highchair. She’s off trying to eat things off the floor. Or walking over to people and grabbing their leg (she’s a very friendly girl). Or just walking off. She can climb a flight of stairs and she is stepping up on things to reach higher.

She’s also figured out how to get off her bed mattress in her own room: she slithers forward enough that her hands touch the ground, then she continues slithering until her knees are on the ground. This works great on her 5″ high mattress. Unfortunately she thinks the same method will work just as well on our bed and other furniture.

Best of all she is entering into the age of angry raptor screeching. This past week with the screaming only highlighted it, but it has become a daily fixture. They’re typically short, ear-piercing screeches full of rage. You blink and it’s over and she’s distracted, playing with a toy. You could almost pretend you just imagined it. Except it happens with some regularity throughout the day.
“What the hell was that?” Den asked me today with a look of surprized concern.
“That?” Kate arched her back again and screeched again when I still wouldn’t let her lean forward to bang on my keyboard while I was writing. “Oh, she’s just angry.”
Reasons for raptor-screeching include the aforementioned no-keyboard-banging; being held when she wants to be put down; being stuck under a piece of furniture; and the biggie, being put to sleep. If she’s wicked tired it’s not a problem, but like tonight when I know she’s tired and needs to sleep but she doesn’t know it… angry screeching when I lay down with her, and she gets very very angry when I hold her tight and try rocking her to sleep. That method is pretty much not working at all anymore. (Plus I think my eardrums are damaged.) If I let her go she returns to happy-Kate but does not become sleeping-Kate. If I continue to hold her tight and whisper and sing and rock she remains raging-Kate. I have to stand up with her and hold her against my chest (but not too tight!) and bounce and hope like hell she realizes she’s tired and puts her head down. Once her head is down and she relaxes I’m golden. But getting there… not so fun.

I am so not ready to have a toddler.

Through Lost and Found I came tonight on the blog of Rainbows & Earthquakes, who just recently has lost their son to a rare metabolic illness. My eyes fill up with tears as I read her posts.

I thought to myself, I can’t imagine losing my child. Isn’t that strange; I already did lose a child. I held him in my arms. I sat with death for a while – the death of dreams, the death of a sweet little person. And yet now, years later, I have a living child, a vibrant, alive child running around my house and I still can’t wrap my brain around it.

My child is climbing. In general we are pretty safe since there’s not a whole lot she can climb on around here – no stairs, not much furniture, some toys. But she’s already proved to us she can climb stairs when given the opportunity (at someone else’s house), and she can climb on and off her bed mattress at will (about 6″ off the ground). Unfortunately she now thinks she can get off all furniture the same way, I caught her trying to slither off of our mattress the other day, face-first. Sweet. I need to figure out how to teach her to go feet-first. Her favorite toy, the Learning Home, has some little attached “shelves” – I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s one round part about 3 inches off the ground. She now spends a lot of time standing on that little platform, gripping the roof of the house, leaning forward and cackling with glee. Den said he nearly had a heart attack the first time he saw her doing it, but then he realized there’s not much he can do about it. Today while playing a basket turned off by her leap frog music table, so she took the opportunity to try climbing onto the table. Den caught her.

One of our nicknames for her is now “Monkey.” I also call her “Goose” pretty regularly (for “silly goose!”).

If books are one of her loves, music is another. She loves her music toys. She’s always liked things that make noise of some sort, but now it is specifically those toys that sing a little song, her favorites currently being her singing bear, camera, and the learning home. She knows exactly what buttons do songs and goes straight for them. I tend to sing along with them now, since the words get stuck in my head, and she’ll often stare at me, fascinated, as I do so. As soon as the song ends – or in many cases about 2 seconds before the song ends – she reaches over to press the button again, then turns back to watch me. Just this week she’s started swinging her arms back and forth, twisting her upper body left and right, in a kind of very primitive baby-dance. Also clapping, as we tend to clap and say, “Yaayyyy!” when a song ends. It’s so adorable! I clearly need to learn more kids songs. She loves it when I sing it to her, but we both get tired of The Itsy Bitsy Spider, Patty Cake, and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I have a very small repertoire.

Apparently teething made my child very anxious about going to bed. It used to be a very simple, pleasant experience, involving laying down, nursing, and falling asleep to a lullaby. She now cries when I walk into the room with her. Putting her on the bed is guaranteed to make her really wail, which doesn’t cease until I uncover the boobs, whether or not she’s actually hungry. And then the falling asleep part, after the nursing and paci-placement, now involves a lot of grabbing for mommy. Clearly I am her security blanket, and also clearly she is very anxious – this is not the pain wail of actual teething, this is the, Noooo, I don’t want to! wail. I don’t mind the cuddling; I do mind the wails and kicking and back arching when I try to cuddle her – it puts me in a pretty sour mood to start the night off. She was doing so well before the teething… we were making progress, she was calm and would lay down and fall asleep with just some back patting. These constant setbacks make me want to scream.

I constantly wonder if I’m doing this wrong… or, no, that’s the wrong word. I don’t think there is a wrong. I wonder if I will regret my choices. That’s the worst part, the self-doubt. I wish there was some manual, some foresight: if I do X, Y will happen. But babies are all different.

And of course just when I think I’ve made up my mind, that something has to change, she falls asleep and sleeps just fine. I’m sitting here scratching my head. Why did it have to take 2 hours of refusing-to-sleep and a meltdown to accomplish this today? Yesterday she went to bed no problems and stayed asleep for 2 hours, then another 2 hours.

Didn’t I mention the waking every 2 hours at 10 months old is getting, well, old? This is by far the main reason she is still in bed next to me – at least then I don’t recall how often she wakes, it’s brief and doesn’t wake me. Having to get up out of bed every 2 hours in the middle of the night? Not cool. We do have a timeline for this: when (if) I get pregnant again, she will need be able to sleep at night without my constant attention. (Daddy will be the one being sent in at that point, and we all know how well they handle broken sleep.)

But I admit that I know I sleep better when she’s next to me. Apparently she has become my security blanket. I believe this is the main reason I haven’t tried any major change that might actually solve the sleep problem… I know that whatever I do is probably going to require consistently putting her in her own bed. I’m still not ready to commit to that. Which is fine. (I think.)

Clearly sleep is our Thing We Struggle With. Some people have problems with feeding; some with illness; some with meeting milestones. Ours? Just sleep. And if the sleep thing just isn’t “great” by anyone’s standards, I wish I at least believed in my decisions enough to say, “Fuck it, I’m doing the best I can.” But I don’t. And that sucks.

I give up. I utterly give up. The last two nights I have been laying in Kate’s bed in the dark for an hour and a half trying to get her to fall back asleep. She wiggles, she cries, she tries crawling away from me, she tries crawling on to me – tonight she actually did fall asleep draped across my chest and neck, but that so does NOT work for me. I’d do the usual waiting until she was asleep and limp and then I’d get up to leave… and her head would snap up. I supposed I could have waited even longer to leave but I’d already been in there for a fucking hour.

This is not working. This is NOT working. It was working, once. We were making minuscule steps forward. And now we’re just heading in the absolute wrong direction. She’s not getting sleep, I’m not getting any time to myself, and I’m just realizing that this needs to change.

So this weekend we’re bringing in the crib, and she’s going to learn to fall asleep without me. I have no idea what that’s going to take, but I imagine no matter what we do there is going to be crying since me trying to put her beside me instead of on top of me causes her to sit up crying.

I took her in the bedroom tonight sniffling and crying because I knew it was the last time I was going to lay down and cuddle her to sleep (at least in normal circumstances). By midnight I was crying just out of frustration.

I wanted this to work. I wanted to be all cool and not use a crib, to cosleep and seamlessly transition to her own room and end up with a kid that sleeps as well as anyone. I want to continue to cosleep half the night. But clearly none of that is actually working out. I know part of being a parent is flying by the seat of your pants and adjusting your expectations. But damn it hurts.

So. We tried CIO. The past few nights I have tried to do all my usual tricks to get her to sleep and nothing was working and there was a lot of crying. I figured if she’s going to cry and not sleep for hours at a time while she’s in my arms I might as well try the crib. What really broke me was naps going to hell too. After several days and nights of that I was being a bitch and I found myself getting angry at Kate during the day. That’s not good, not at all. I kept thinking, what the hell am I doing? She’s getting worse and worse, and here my friends babies are sleeping just fine. No I have no illusions that Kate will miraculously sleep through the night, but maybe she would learn to fall asleep on her own, maybe she would just get better and start sleeping. I hear it everywhere, over and over again: you have to let them cry it out for them to learn. Den and I agreed to give it a shot.

It. Was. Awful. I figured she’d cry/scream for a while (1 hour of screaming, then 1 and a half hours of tired whimpering as she dozed off presumably sitting up, then woke up crying again), but then she’d fall asleep. What I did not foresee was her waking back up an hour later, screaming more, and so on throughout the night. Awful doesn’t even begin to describe it. I wanted to climb out of my skin. I did cry, a lot. We didn’t want to give up, we wanted to stick it out and see if it would work.

But. I layed there thinking, again, “What the hell am I doing?” It felt so wrong. I have parenting this child by instinct from the start, always doing what I felt was right. I have read her cues, I have listened to her, I have followed my heart. And this went against all of it. It didn’t feel like I was teaching her, it felt like I was punishing her. All I kept thinking was, what is she thinking right now? She’s confused, she’s beyond tired, she’s upset, she’s scared. She doesn’t know why mommy isn’t here. And the thing is, I have slept with her for 10 months. That’s not her fault she needs me.

I didn’t make a decision in the dark of night while she cried. But when I got up in the morning and felt as terrible as I did at 3am, and when I thought and thought about it for hours, then I made a decision. It is not important enough to me to do this. Even if she does end up getting used to it and sleeping in her crib, I don’t think I can be okay with myself for making that decision. It’s not right for me.

We are going to continue to make changes and work on her sleep, but we’re going to do it my way – for good or ill. Maybe I’ll screw it up, maybe in 3 months I’ll wish I had done something different. But unfortunately all I have is the here and now so this is what I’m going with.

We did put the crib in her room and I’ve decided to continue to use it. Kate has gotten to the point where when I lay down with her she doesn’t want to be forced to lay down and she’s constantly climbing on me and trying to walk off. It’s not a safety thing – her room is baby safe and the mattress is directly on the floor – but when she can wander off and pull things off shelves and play with her diapers and climb on me and on and off the mattress it really doesn’t matter how long I wait, she does not sleep. Plus the getting climbed on and smacked in the head gets really old at midnight. If I try pinning her down to sleep that doesn’t teach her anything and it makes her wicked pissed. So. With her in the crib she gets to move around – within reason. She has a few quiet toys in there (a mirror, a taggies blanket, a stuffed animal, a crib piano). The futon mattress is right in front of the crib. So we’re going to use the crib, but I’m going to be laying right beside her.

Nap #1 today I tried to comfort her without letting her hold my hand. When she’d lay down on my hand I’d remove it, and she’d just start crying all over again. I ended up having to take her for a long stroller walk to get her to sleep, I didn’t want to keep trying and failing. Naps are so hard – if she doesn’t get one then I know bedtime will be that much harder. Nap #2 I let her put her head on my hand. It did take her half an hour of walking around her crib playing with toys and a little bit of confused crying, but she finally layed herself down and fell asleep. Yes this still uses me as a lovie, we’ll work on that, but it accomplishes two very important things: she layed herself down, and she’s sleeping in the crib. That’s pretty major for us here. And I actually think it was less stressful than the days when I have literally wrestled her down to force her to sleep.

We’ll see how tonight goes.

Two nights ago, after Kate had fallen asleep for a while and Den and I had gone to bed, I felt a heavy shadow pressing down on me – one that had nothing to do with the struggles Kate was facing. In my bed in the dark I felt so alone. It was more than just the alone after moving the baby to her old room… it was the cold, panicky alone that I felt after Devin died. I haven’t felt that way in a very long time, but then I haven’t been alone at night in a year and a half. The nights were always the worst for me, when the gremlins in my mind would come out and pick away at my sanity. I understand why sleeping with Kate was always such a comfort for me, to be able to feel her warmth, to wake up and immediately remember where and when I am. When she is sleeping peacefully in the next room it’s too easy to forget.

::

I am feeling much better about things now that we’ve changed our approach. Kate is still confused and a little upset, but a little bit of tired whimpering is all she’s doing. She’s learned very quickly to lay down on my hand. It’s clear that is not what she would prefer, but since she is barred from climbing on top of me she is settling for it. In the middle of the night it was very quickly that she fell back asleep, very little crying if any.

Falling asleep for naps is taking longer than I’m used to, I’m used to nursing her and holding her until she’s out in 3 minutes flat. But while she does spend a few minutes playing with her little blanket and stuffed animal she’s only doing it for a few minutes until she realizes she’s tired, whimpers, and lays down. It’s taking far longer for her to fall asleep after laying down – lots of fidgeting, patting her mattress, grabbing the crib slats, grabbing at my hand, whimpering, etc. If I remove my hand from the crib she sits up and gives a little cry, however after the intial patting and grabbing of my hand she’s actually fallen asleep on her own without touching me. That was entirely unexpected. As she’s falling asleep she’s been opening her eyes to make sure it’s still there in sight, so I just hold position until she’s asleep. In a day or two I’ll remove my hand and see if she can settle without it.

The question for me is about night feeding. Since she is used to nursing all night and has been very distracted and not nursing much during the day I didn’t want to cut her off at night – I don’t want my supply to suddenly nosedive and I want to make sure she gets enough calories. So I think it will have to be a slow changeover by necessity. The past two nights I nursed her twice and I woke up feeling very full… apparently she was nursing more at night than I realized. I was even able to pump off an extra bottle last night and probably could have pumped more. I’m glad to have the extra milk because we want to start getting her drinking out of a sippy cup but I have very little saved in the freezer (we operate on “I pump to replace what’s used that evening” so we only have about 12oz in the freezer at any given time).

So, progress. And I’m no longer having a breakdown, which is good.