Friday was Maren's eleven month birthday. I can't believe that she is almost a year old! At eleven months, she is more expressive than ever. She is able to communicate a lot with pointing and sounds, and has even started saying a few words. She is not super consistent, but she says all sorts of things, like ball, hat, duck, baby, mama, dada, apple, bubbles, bear, and I'm not sure what else. Of course most of these sound nothing like the actual words, with the exception of mama and dada. She is crawling faster and faster, and standing up with just a little support. She had four teeth come in in the past month, and can now bite things like apples and peaches. She is acting more and more like a kid and less like a baby.
We are continuing to work on sleep, and although we are having ups and downs still, it seems like things are starting to improve. It seems like it is a little harder to make changes to sleep for Maren compared with how it seems to go for other babies. We are not doing a quick cry-it-out approach, so we knew it would take longer, but Maren is expressive of her opinions about things. She is quite expressive about her displeasure with some of the changes we have been making to sleep. However, we have been very consistent, and have been working with some of the changes for a long time now, and as she is getting more used to the routine she is liking it better. This morning we had a huge triumph where she went to sleep for a nap in her crib with about ten seconds of fussing, and stayed asleep for over an hour. She has never napped in her crib for that long. The magic was not repeated for her afternoon nap, but I think we are making slow steady progress.
She is a joyful little baby, and we love every minute that we spend with her :-)
I have many things to talk about today, so I will list them by number:
1. I bought a tricycle. It is just like a kids tricycle, only bigger. The purpose of buying this tricycle was to have some way of doing the equivalent of going for a walk. Right now I have a recumbent bike and my scooter, and neither one is really like going for a walk. The tricycle requires about the same amount of effort as walking to go at walking speed, and I sit higher up on it so going for a walk with someone else is better – it is easier to walk and talk. This thing is quite heavy, and wide, so it's not perfect, but it is a way for me to feel stable and comfortable and get a bit of exercise. The biggest draw is that supposedly it works in the snow. The wheels are pretty heavy duty, so I think it probably will work. This is my attempt at finding a way to get outside in the winter :-)
2. Daycare is starting to go better. The first few days were amazing, and Maren had a super fun time. She wasn't upset and all after we left, and she just played. Then something happened, maybe she caught on to the fact that we were going to keep leaving her there, and she started to be very upset. She cried the entire time she was there (about two hours) twice. We were told by a couple of people at the daycare that we were not bringing her at a particularly good time, since people were going on break, it was right around lunch so everyone was busy feeding the kids, and we were told that breaking her in the morning early would be better. But we were concerned about naps, so we were bringing her between naps. But after a couple of days of having her cry the whole time, we decided that it was better for her to not nap and perhaps have more time to get to know the staff. So last week on Thursday and Friday we brought her in for the whole morning, from about eight fifteen until twelve fifteen or so. It went much better. The first day we did this she cried for the first ten minutes, and then was okay, and the second day she cried as we were leaving, but then didn't cry the rest of the time. On the second day she even had a half hour nap! So now we are going to start bringing her every morning, as having a consistent routine seems to help with these changes. This means that even though I did not really plan on going back to work until about two weeks from now, I am back at work. I thought I would be pretty sad about it, but being back at work is kind of fun and stimulating. The only thing I am sad about is being away from Maren for hours at a time, but knowing that she is in good hands and that she is doing okay makes it easier :-)
3. I think Maren may be starting to use her first words. It is confusing, because she has been babbling for a long time with the same sounds, and she isn't super consistent yet, but it seems like she is saying mama, dada, duck, ball, and hat. This video is not perfect, but gives you an idea:
4. Sleep. I am feeling very ambivalent about our sleep coaching plan. It has taken us a huge amount of time, and we are starting to see some results. Maren is now able to go to sleep in her crib within about five minutes at night, with little to no crying. Last night, amazingly, she slept the entire night without waking up ( this is not necessarily expected – as part of the plan, she is still expected to potentially wake up for a feed one time after I go to bed). I did a "dream feed" where I fed her just before I went to bed without waking her up, and then she didn't wake up again until just before 7 AM. So that part is going extremely well. The part I am feeling ambivalent about right now is naps. Right now she is crying for 20 to 30 minutes before each nap. I feel horrible about it! I understand that maybe it doesn't sound that bad, but she really doesn't cry that much or for that long, except occasionally in the car. It upsets me quite a bit to see her so upset. I am hoping that naps get better pretty quickly, because it seems so stressful for her, and it is definitely stressful for me!
First, I need to acknowledge that Jeff and I celebrated our ten year wedding anniversary on August 4. It is hard to believe that it has been ten years already! Maren has started easing into daycare, and she had her second day on our anniversary, so we went out to lunch (she was only there for about an hour and a half or two hours). Later that night, we opened up our "wedding predictionary," in which Jeff and I and our wedding guests all made predictions about what would transpire over the ten years following our wedding. It was fun to read what people had written, and what we had written. Some people were right on in their predictions, which was interesting, and some people just had fun with it :-) In many ways it was not what we had anticipated for our ten year anniversary, as I think that we thought we would do something more elaborate. But sitting on the couch at home looking at people's predictions for what our life would be like now, while Maren was asleep down the hall, is probably more fitting anyway. We did take our trip to Hawaii (though I don't think we would have made the trek if it was just for anniversary), but in general it might feel not quite genuine to make a big deal out of it :-)
We are still in the midst of our long journey toward better sleep for Maren. The first few nights of our sleep plan went really well – Maren was able to fall asleep fairly quickly and without tears while getting use to falling asleep without nursing. After that, things were rougher for a little while. The next step after falling asleep without nursing was to have Maren fall asleep in her crib, but with us helping in any way we could. So the first night she fell asleep pretty easily with me just rubbing her back. The next night was not so easy – she got upset, and Jeff ended up rocking her to sleep. Same thing the next night.
According to our sleep plan, if Maren was not taking well to this step, we were simply supposed to move on to the next step, which was having her fall asleep in her crib with comfort from us but without us helping her all the way to sleep. This did not go so well at all. There was lots and lots of crying, despite many attempts at comforting her. The crying was intense, and quite distressing to me. Things were supposed to be much better after three nights, but they were not. And then Jeff had to go to a conference in Philadelphia. So I continued with our sleep plan for two nights while he was away, and the first night went pretty well, but the second night not so well. And then Maren got sick and had a fever. So our sleep coaching was put on pause while we waited for her to get better.
Fortunately, she got better very quickly, and we were able to resume. We expected things to be pretty much the same as they were before the pause, but things have turned out to be completely different. At least in terms of crying. For the past two nights she has spent some time playing in her crib before going to sleep, and crying for short bursts (which are intense, but sometimes limited to just a few seconds). She does actually seem to be figuring out how to put herself to sleep. Although it is taking a while so far (almost an hour and a half last night and almost an hour tonight), it seems like we are starting to make progress.
However, I am a little worried because this sleep plan has us continuing to work on going to sleep, then adding in working on night wakings, and only after that starting to work on naps. I am worried because we will need her to be at daycare during nap time in just a few weeks. I am not sure whether we will have gotten naps working well in the crib by then. I will give more details about daycare soon, but for now keep your fingers crossed that sleep improves more quickly so that we can start having Maren try to be at daycare during naptime!
First, let me say that I am not impressed so far with Windows 10. Every time I turn on my computer I run into some kind of problem. Today I was unable to open my web browser (chrome), so I am using "Microsoft edge," and I swear that I am being forced to use Microsoft products against my will. The problems I am having are cutting significantly into my blog time, which is very limited as it is. I may gripe about this a bit more later, but for now I am done.
Last weekend we took a short trip to Columbus for our friend Meredith's wedding. It was a very quick trip, but lots of fun.
As I have mentioned previously, sleep has been up and down, and we really needed to do something to improve it. We decided to hire a sleep consultant (online), and we are working through a sleep plan. The last couple of weeks we have been working on being consistent with a new schedule, and this has improved the length of naps a bit. Tonight was the first night of changing up bed time, and it went fairly well. Normally Maren nurses to sleep, and tonight was the first night of getting her to fall asleep without nursing. We switched up our bedtime routine so that we read some books after nursing, and then used other methods (rocking, bouncing, rubbing her back) to get her to fall asleep. She was unhappy and frustrated at first, but pretty quickly was able to fall asleep. She still fell asleep on me, and I had to transfer her to her crib, but this is the first step in getting her to fall asleep in her crib, and hopefully stay asleep for much of the night. Fingers crossed that things keep working!
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