She's on the move, she's on the move...

Our little girl is such a big girl these days. She is still very focused on getting up on her feet so that she can "walk," but she has also finally also learned to sit up, scoot around, CRAWL, eat big-girl food (in baby-food form, but don't tell her that), and most recently, PULL HERSELF UP TO NEAR-STANDING. It is alarming, to say the least. She will definitely be walking soon, from the looks of it. And we need a crib... ASAP. :( We're still co-sleeping our lives away at night, but I can't leave her on the big bed for naps, nor can I leave her in the "bassinette" feature of the Pack N Play (she is literally capable of pulling herself up and over the edge), NOR will she sleep in the play-pen part of the PNP.

One of my many parenting sins is that window in the morning where she wakes up and Mommy don't wanna... So I lie there, barely conscious, keeping my hand on her and periodically yanking her back from the edge so she doesn't fall off the bed as she tries and tries to crawl off the cliff.

Well, there's that, and there are the times that I have let her crawl around the living room and zone out. It is ALWAYS a mistake. Yesterday was a very bad one. In the minute and a half that I was not paying attention, she got ahold of a Lindt wrapper that still had some melted chocolate on it (found melted chocolate on her face...), ate a piece of carpet fiber (which I swabbed, much to her horror, from the back of her throat), and finally found a THUMB TACK near the fireplace, which THANK GOD I got away from her before she did any damage.

And let us not even discuss that one time that I lost my last grain of patience and let out a full-on, I-am-about-to-be-murdered SCREAM when she would not stop crying one day, and proceeded to walk out of the house with her in front of the downstairs neighbor, who had heard it all. I'm still surprised he didn't call CPS.

Or that time it was 11 at night and I was dragging her down the stairs in the carrier to go for ANOTHER drive, and muttered something about "I love you, but you drive me f*cking insane sometimes," only to glance over and see the OTHER downstairs neighbor peeking out her window screen at that very moment.

Uh, anyway, this was supposed to be about her grown-up-ness, not my parenting failure. I just can't believe how big she is, and what a little personality she has already. She loves: Purses (mostly mine. mostly in her mouth.), shopping, and phones (mostly mine or Daddy's. mostly in her mouth.), as most girls do. She also loves boobies, but we assume she'll grow out of that one. She is not much of a cuddler, which is sad for me, but it's just her drive to move and get into everything... she doesn't want to take the time to be snuggled. And that is reason number 514 that we will probably wind up co-sleeping until she's 5... It's only when she's fast asleep that I can really hold her like the little baby that she is.

But she is extremely fun and cute and sociable, provided I (or Daddy or sometimes Grandma) am right nearby. And I hope that I will struggle less with the patience issue when the wedding is behind us and I am not a bridezilla anymore. But I like to think we are both happy and healthy, she and I. And I hold onto a moment with my dad, when he was sitting in our apartment and watching me play with Luci.

He suddenly looked up and said, "You know what? You're a good mom."
It was just what I needed to hear. :)

The object of her desire: Daddy's Xbox controller. Please ignore the strangulation hazard posed by the measuring tape around her neck.

Mmm, carrots! Please ignore the permanent brain injury/ DEATH hazard posed by seating her in the Bumbo on the counter.

Ooh, cords and wires! Please ignore the electrocution hazard posed by the millions of live wires I allowed her to explore.

"Is this okay, Mommy?"
Probably not, but hey, I'm just that kind of mom.

The FOB

And maybe it's time for a last-minute Flowbee?

My dad decided that, as he is now a "geezer," he needs to own a tuxedo. He asked me, "So, should I buy one for my current, fat self or for the self that could be thin in the future?"

I said, "Uh, buy one that FITS you now so you don't look retarded at my wedding."

"So a fat one" he said.

So this is the ensemble he put together off of Ebay. He took this pic with his phone (oh, you could tell? :)) and sent it to my phone. I have been laughing at it for about three days. I hope he wears those reading glasses on our walk down the aisle.

Ah, I love him. :)

Sleep Update

It is probably a mistake to start a new blog, since I got Luci down about an hour ago and it isn't QUITE dark, and I'm afraid that if her radar goes off before the sun really goes down, she's going to want to play when she wakes up, instead of nursing back to sleep.

But I wanted to give a small update on how it's going since I just posted the original complain-y sleep-issues blog from last week. It's been a really up-and-down process to attempt to change our habits so that Luci's schedule isn't quite as chaotic as ours. Some nights, I seem to miss the "window" when she's ready for bed (especially if we are out somewhere in the evening), and she gets a second wind that can last for hours. And she is CRABBY the whole time I let her stay up, but will not go to sleep. I will try and try to get her down by nursing, singing, rubbing, holding, and even just letting her cry. But if she isn't ready, she isn't going down. Those nights, I usually emerge from the bedroom, baby in hand, looking very tired and very frustrated. Adam always reassures me and says, "It's going to take some time!" I usually glare at him, Luci, and everyone and everything else nearby. I am tired, and therefore I am easily frustrated. Or, I grab the car keys, throw her in the car seat and go for a drive, because that is still the "quick fix."

And then there are other nights, like tonight, where I manage to get through her routine (cereal, bath, read, nurse, put her down in the Pack N Play) at the right place in her internal clock. I have been letting her cry a little more in the last few days, since it seems like she is learning to soothe herself once I LEAVE the room. As long as I'm there, she will look for me and cry. Once I leave, she will cry, but if she is really tired and ready to go down, she will.

The maddening thing is that I still don't really understand why some nights it seems so easy, and other nights it's a major struggle. I try to be consistent in what we are doing from day to day without being TOO rigid, but somehow that doesn't seem to matter.

And the same goes for daytime naps... I am trying to be consistent, but some days are better than others. We still go for drives, or I create or delay errands based on how sleepy (or CRABBY) she is getting. One thing that HAS worked most of the time is a suggestion I got from the book The No-Cry Sleep Solution: if baby wakes up from a nap before the 1-hour mark, try to get her back to sleep as quickly as possible. Some days, this has REALLY made a difference for us. If she falls asleep in the car, wakes up crying after 30 minutes at home, and I can pull her out and nurse her back to sleep ASAP, she usually wakes up 30-60 minutes later in a much better mood. I had no idea of the importance of longer naps before I read that. I used to just let her be up once she was up, and she was much fussier back then.

Anyway, tonight is (so far) a good night. We started her routine around 7:00, and she was in her Pack N Play asleep by 7:45. I let her cry, but it was only intermittent, and she fell asleep relatively fast. She woke up around 9:00 (and it was just about dark! yay!), and I nursed her back to sleep. It's been about 15 minutes since I left the room and she's still out, so I'm hoping she will be out for the NIGHT! (and by "for the night," I mean no long wakings between now and the morning... because she will still be up to nurse a bunch of times...)

Now if only Adam would come home from work and enjoy this with me...

Driving Miss Luci

(Okay, I wrote this about a week ago on Facebook, but I am still going to re-post it here in an effort to spruce up my sad-looking family blog, and also because most of it still applies to the current sleep battle...)

Or, The Blog I Have Written Three Times Because I CANNOT Finish Anything I Start Due to Baby Things and/ or Power Failure
Part I:

It is probably a stupid idea to attempt to write this blog, as Luci is asleep and her Mom-is-having-alone-time radar will surely go off by the time I finish it. Also, I could be folding the laundry I threw on the bed while Luci was whining at me and failed to finish folding when the whining began to drive me crazy, or finishing any one of the eighty million things I still need to do around this house, but I am just feeling drained.

We were blessed to have my friend Dana come over for a couple of hours Wednesday afternoon so that Mommy could have free hands for a while, and I now have a slightly cleaner house (THANK YOU, DANA!). As i said in the last blog, it has basically been my fantasy lately to have somebody come and entertain Luci so that I could clean for a few hours. I used to nanny for a family whose parents were pharmaceutical reps who worked from home. I never completely understood the need for a babysitter for a work-from-home job until now. I need a babysitter just for the STAYING at home "job," though right now I wish that we were doing a little more "staying" and a little less driving, but I'll get to that in a second.

But I am hoping that this is just a particularly needy stage we are going through with Luci. The past couple of weeks especially have been exhausting. She has had a constant runny nose for two weeks, and I HOPE she is preparing to cut a tooth, because she is crabby all the time (unless we are out in public, because she loves to show off what a good and happy girl she is to strangers). I now thoroughly regret not establishing a schedule with her in the early months (although it's not that I never tried... I just never thought it was "working" and therefore gave up), because we are having the worst time with sleeping routines now. The ONLY way I can get her to take ...

**SHE TOTALLY JUST WOKE UP AS I PREDICTED, BUT IS NOW PLAYING SOMEWHAT HAPPILY IN THE WALKER**

...a nap is to go for a drive. I am probably spending a fortune in gas as I just cruise the neighborhood, hop on the freeway to nowhere, or create some unnecessary errand for us in order to get out of the house and PUT HER TO SLEEP. It's the most maddening thing. I can try for HOURS to get her to take a nap. She no longer likes the bouncer. The swing no longer puts her to sleep. She is a BUSY girl, and she wants to be on her feet and Mommy to be holding her up. She doesn't even like to be held most of the time so much as she likes to be held UP so she can "walk" around and find stray Kleenex to eat. She does still like walks in the stroller, but I'm not really up for that until the late evening in the heat we've been having.

So we drive. Or we drive, park, and shop, because generally, she will stay asleep for shopping. I can't count the number of times I have arrived at our front door with her sleeping in the carseat, my heart full of hopes that I will be able to sit in peace in quiet or unload the dishwasher for 30 minutes, and the second I put the key in the lock, she wakes up wailing. I don't know how she knows.

Then, at bedtime, it takes about three hours to get her down. We have just started her on cereal, so the time between that, the bath, the nursing, the wrestling, the giving-up-and-going-for-a-drive, and her sleeping... is about three hours. I know that the extended bedtime is probably related to her being over-tired, but I don't know how to fix that when I'm already driving (literally!) myself crazy all day trying to get her to nap.

So, needless to say, her sleep issues are my sleep issues, since I can't take a nap when I am driving around and/ or shopping all day, and because I have been staying up late or getting out of bed late when I have FINALLY gotten her down, so that I can have a couple of hours to DO anything, or do nothing. I stayed up until 4am finishing the wedding invitations, because I literally COULD NOT keep her happy long enough to get anything done in the week and a half that I had to finish this task. I have had a few meltdowns lately in the form of "I wish I had a real job so I would be entitled to a full night's sleep" (which... I am not exactly how that would work, since Luci doesn't seem to care who has a real job or not. :) I just get jealous of Adam sometimes, as I am sure he gets jealous of me) or simply, "I am failing at everything," but I know I am doing okay.

And no, I am not ready to trade her in, although I would be happy to rent her out for a few hours some days. I am just a new mom who feels like this stage is never going to end, like she's never going to turn thirteen and want nothing to do with me.

Part II:
HOLY CRAP, fast forward two days from when most of this blog was written, and we have a miracle: I have just gotten Luci down for a nap the SECOND DAY IN A ROW in her Pack 'N Play (portable crib/ playpen, for those of you who can still walk in your houses without tripping over eighty pieces of "baby gear"). I did it for the first time yesterday and though I was having delusions. She has basically NEVER gone to sleep any way except nursing, driving, or being in the swing with a pacifier.

But, out of desperation after nursing and wrestling her on the big bed for about 40 minutes, I put her in yesterday to see if she would wear herself out wrestling with her big fluffy doggy instead of her big fluffy mom. She cried a little, but I rubbed her back and sang to her. And then an AMAZING THING happened: she put her head down and yawned. My heart started to pound with excitement, but it nearly exploded with excitement when, a few minutes later, I affirmed that she was truly ASLEEP. No boob in her mouth, not even a pacifier. Even when I took my hand off her back, she didn't stir.

And this is probably a skill that MOST new parents learn within a few days of bringing home their bundle, but I don't care that I am just getting the hang of it. We have co-slept all her life, from the very first night in the hospital. And while that arrangement drives me crazy sometimes, I absolutely hate it when someone tells me, "Oh, that's not good." I think it has been a very good thing in a few different ways, and especially for the quarter that I was in school and away from her for a 4-6 hour chunk most days. She had to catch up on her mama snuggles and nursings. And she really sleeps very well snuggled up to me. She nurses very often still, and that is the only reason I get crappy sleep with this arrangement (well, that and the occasional crotch-kicking, face-whacking fest she throws in the morning). Aside from the half-wakings where she wakes up and squirms just enough to tell me it's time to switch sides, she sleeps through the night.

Anyway, all that to say: there's a teeny tiny light at the end of this tunnel. She has surprised me with these very grown-up naps, and I am sure she will surprise me some more. :)