Jeez louise, did someone swap out my child? She’s always been a GREAT sleeper. Never ever had a problem sleeping at night as long as I was in bed, though it was at times touchy getting her to sleep for a few hours while I was up – but she had been doing great with that, too. This week has just been one of those weeks, I guess. We thought maybe she was teething, but she doesn’t seem to be in pain or even unhappy. In fact, she’s a little too happy. I think that’s the problem: she is having so much fun rolling and sitting and playing and new toys and wheeeeee! No sleep for Kate! Yeah, until she melts down in this pathetic mess of Waahhhhh! Happy screeee! Waaaaahhhhhhh…

Thankfully last night she finally ran out of steam at 1am and fell asleep in my arms. This is the weird part: she’s been falling asleep laying on her back on my lap, nursing or sucking on a paci. My child? Falling asleep on her back? Wha? So I tip-toed carefully to bed and we both got some rest. 10am this morning I woke up, knowing I really needed to get up and Kate kept cracking her eyes open, looking at me while I said, “Kaatteeee, time to get uuupppp,” turning her head, and falling right back asleep. And then she cried a little when she did finally wake up. I think she would have kept on sleeping.

I’m not really sure where things got so out of whack, she had a very long-standing bedtime of around 9pm, and up for the day at 9am. It varied by a little bit day to day, of course, but I never set that schedule, she did. It worked. But this past week 9pm comes and goes and she is not tired. 11pm she sometimes goes to bed. And then wakes back up again, happy as a clam and ready to go. A couple of weeks ago I noticed she had started dropping her evening naps, but when she started napping at around 6pm again I didn’t think much about it… until now. I’m thinking maybe she was right, she needs to stop taking that evening nap so she’ll sleep at night. It might be rough for a few days trying to shift it all back over again.

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Why does it feel like I only post when she’s sleeping badly? Maybe because that’s the only time I feel frustrated.

Her attitude lately has been awesome. Other than the tired and whiny episodes, she is just so full of FUN. I installed Baby Smash on my laptop (thanks Virginia!!) and I quickly realized I could not let her keep bashing on my good laptop. So I did what only true geeks do… I reformatted my old, slow laptop, installed just a few things for her, and set it up on the floor for her. She LOVES IT. I have a video and some pictures I took, I’ll put them up here when I get around to editing them. I have never seen her so excited. When I open and turn on the laptop now she starts pumping her arms, shrieking, and leaning forward towards it. It’s great because I sit her on the floor with the keyboard, boppy pillow behind her just in case she falls over, and then I can go and make myself food or vacuum or edit pictures or whatever I need to do. And I don’t have to worry about her messing something up on my computer. The game locks the computer so you have to press certain keys to get out of it, the intention being that babies are not talented enough to do so, but apparently my child is uber talented because there have been multiple times where she’s managed to do strange, strange things to that computer. Next on my list is getting her a kids keyboard that doesn’t have function, alt, ctrl, and windows keys. Might be safer.

Her sitting has improved tenfold over the past two weeks. She went from “oh wait, I can do this” to near-mastery in that time span. She rarely falls over now, only when she’s distracted. She uses her arms to prop herself up to reach for things, which I was quite amazed at. She’s also leaning and pulling herself forward onto her knees, flopping down onto her belly. Yikes man. I think it won’t be long before she’s figured out how to crawl. She’s also trying to pull up onto me… she rolls onto my lap, then is yanking at my shirt and arms and legs to try to pull up. In fact she seems far more interested in pulling up and standing than she is being on her knees. She is not working on getting to her knees from laying on her belly. Perhaps we’ll have a walk-before-crawl-er.

I’m pretty sure all of that is why she’s not sleeping well. That’s a lot at once. It’s funny when I think back to how she used to hate being put down. Now there are days when I’m out for several hours and she’s demanding to be put down on the floor so she can roll around and sit up and work on all her new skills. I definitely have to make sure I give her that time every day or she gets fussy.

She’s also become a much more easy-going baby than she started out. She was a very needy newborn, and I always got the feeling that she was just pissed off being stuck in a body that she couldn’t control very well. Now that she’s figured out how to do the things that she wants, how to control parts of her environment and move herself around, well, it’s a whole different game! She’s still a cuddly baby, loves to give hugs and kisses and crawl all over me, she still likes the kozy carrier when I’m out, but now I can just plunk her on the floor with some toys and go wash dishes or get some food. It’s pretty darn awesome, I must say.

She is just a happy kid. She screeches happily, she plays happily, she interacts with people happily. She gets serious when trying to figure things out. She cries sometimes when she’s been left somewhere for too long and she’s had enough, if she’s stuck in the car after her patience runs out, or when she’s dirty, hungry, or hurt. It’s usually pretty obvious what the problem is and easily fixed, then she’s right back to happy again.

Kate playing with Baby Smash on my computer:

Kate using me to stand up tonight: