Moving and shaking

 I don't have much time tonight, so I will just leave you with this video that I took yesterday. It is not particularly exciting, but note that Maren has moved from small bucket to upside down garbage can to cat food container  as her walker of choice :)

Play date

Yesterday we had a play date with some babies - and their moms - from the moms group I was going to before starting back at work. It was super fun to see these moms and babies in an unstructured social setting. 

We also started back up with the library program that we did in the spring, and there were lots of babies there really close in age to Maren. I am hoping that maybe we will end up making some friends there this fall.

Having a baby really changed our social life, and for me I feel like it has been for the better. I have been meeting lots of moms, and it is helping me to feel much more connected to Regina. We have some friends who also have babies and toddlers, and the kinds of things we do with them has changed with the addition of kids, but we now have one more thing in common. It may be a while before we have a games night again, but until then, breakfast/brunch/lunch together is great.

And just for fun, a video of Maren this afternoon:

The latest on sleep

We have been working on sleep for quite some time. At times it has been frustrating, and even agonizing. We opted for "gentle sleep coaching," but there was quite a bit more crying than I was happy with. We stuck with our plan, but had to get some reassurance from our sleep consultant couple of times. After describing how things were going, she suggested we read their article on temperament. As if we didn't know what temperament was. Apparently Maren has a slightly more difficult temperament when it comes to sleep coaching, even though she is an easy baby. So where some people see results in a couple of weeks, we have been doing this for basically a couple of months. However, all this hard work is starting to pay off. We are seeing some serious improvements in sleep!

For the last several nights, we have had pretty incredible sleep. Maren has woken up a couple of times in the night, but quickly put herself back to sleep (within a couple of minutes). And, for the last couple of days, we have had incredible naps. Maren's morning naps are starting to be more like what we have been told they "should" be like: she has been sleeping for ninety minutes or more. Her afternoon naps are a bit shorter, but still around maybe forty-five minutes. All of her sleeping is now in the crib. We do our routine, put her down, and within a couple of minutes she goes to sleep. Last night it took a bit longer for her to go down, because she was wrestling with her stuffed bunny, but she seems to actually really enjoy bedtime these days.

And, for the first time in a very, very long time, I am getting decent sleep. It is blissful :-)

Bucket

Jeff had a bucket in his lab that he was going to get rid of (toys for child research participants came in it, and it had no use). I thought it was a nice bucket, and Maren might enjoy putting things into it and dumping them out. She loves the bucket, but found an entirely different purpose for it.

She used it for the first time on Saturday:

This was her first time using anything as a walker.

Now by today she has become proficient:

She and her bucket are now pretty much inseparable!

Eleven-month-old Maren

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 :-)