Early to bed, early to rise

The last few nights Maren has been going to bed earlier and earlier, and waking up earlier and earlier. Last night around 5:30 PM she made it absolutely clear that she needed to go to bed. When she wants to sleep, if we try to keep her awake we just end up with a screaming baby. So, last night we started getting her ready for bed a little after 5:30 PM, and she was sound asleep by 6 PM. In a way it is nice to have the evening to get things done, etc., but it comes with a downside: this morning she was fully awake at around 4:30 AM, ready to get up for the day.

For a long time, she was sleeping about twelve hours at night, so early bedtimes were not such a problem. But now she is sleeping more like ten hours at night, so when she wants to go to bed extra early, it is somewhat of a problem. Tonight she was asleep closer to 7 PM, and the number of hours she sleeps at night is variable, so I am hoping for a good twelve hour night and a 7 AM wake-up time, but we will see. When she doesn't sleep as many hours at night, it means more naps during the day (like five), and that means that some days it seems like all we do is try to help her get to sleep – she is still having some trouble getting to sleep for naps.

This morning Jeff got up with her at 4:30 AM, and then around 5:30 AM it seemed like maybe she wanted to go back to sleep so he brought her back to bed. She nursed, and did go back to sleep, but unfortunately only for half an hour or so (the length of all of her naps). So then I got up with her and let Jeff sleep a bit. I am hopeful that this will be a short phase, but it's hard to say.

Also in the past week we had our first true middle of the night wide-awake baby. She woke up around 2 AM, and although I think she was quite tired, did not go back to sleep until around 4 AM. That was a bit rough. I know that some people experience this from the get go, but this was our first time dealing with this kind of thing. Usually in the night she wakes me/us up when she needs to nurse, but she doesn't fully wake up herself, and I hope that our two hour wide-awake experience was an anomaly and not a preview of things to come. We have been very lucky so far to have a very good little sleeper, and I am really hoping that any difficulties are short-lived :-)

Maren's current new developments include ever increasing strength during tummy time, responding to her name (probably just in the past day or so), and making many new sounds. We saw some friends today and one said that Maren makes sounds like a dinosaur :-) She also grew in length sometime during the past week (it seemed to happen overnight), so I think we are going to have to move her into some different clothes soon! Below is a video I took this evening – it's not super exciting but it does show what she is like right now!