Back to Belly

This past Friday Beia finally figured out how to roll from back to front. As exciting as this development is, it's also brought a whole new level of frustration to sleep—for everyone. Now when we lay Beia down to bed in her crib, the first thing she does is roll onto her side in an effort get onto her belly. Then, if and when she gets there, she cries in frustration because either her arm is stuck underneath her or because she's cornered herself in the crib and cannot roll back over. If she can't roll over in the first place, that too warrants a cry in frustration.

When this happens at 4 or 5am, we are crying right along in frustration. This morning, however, Beia somehow found a happy position on her belly...fussed a little...then slept for two hours until waking up at the very reasonable time of 7:15am. I'm hoping this means that she's starting to figure out how to sleep on her belly, or at least how to be happy on her belly, so we can all get a bit more sleep.

China Doll

A couple weeks ago I made the mistake of turning Lara onto various flash sale sites that have discounted baby clothes. This would not have been too much of a problem, however, after purchasing a couple of REALLY cute outfits, Lara is now playing dress up with Beia like she is a china doll. Also we (read: Lara) now go onto Gilt every night at dinner to see what cute outfits they have for Beia. My next big error was when I mentioned we should start looking for sales on winter outfits, as they may have bigger discounts. Thankfully, we are not the only parents that use Gilt to buy cute discounted outfits, so things sell out fast. Right now we are on the waitlist for 7 items (1.5 items a week)!! We (Lara) has also started find other “inexpensive” places she likes—BabyGap, Zara, etc. The dangerous part is that living in Soho/Tribeca we are within walking distance of a litany of boutique baby shops, and with Spring arriving we will taking Beia out for walks more frequently. Beia is going to quickly go from being the baby who always wears pajama’s to being Lara’s fashionable toy doll.

FEET!

This week Beia discovered her feet. And how nicely they can be shoved into her mouth. Unfortunately, this new found habit gets a bit hairy—literally—when you combine the slobber with the cat hair floating around our apartment. Yuck. The upside is that she is now always happy to hold her feet for you while you clean her butt. Downside—it makes it more difficult to actually put ON the diaper once said butt is clean.  

Sleep Begets Sleep

On Tuesday we made the ginormous mistake of thinking we needed to start sleep training Beia. Our goal was to eliminate her waking up around 11pm/12am since she hasn't been hungry at that time, yet wasn't able to get herself back to sleep without the paci. Tuesday night started out ok, and we were able to get her to sleep by her usual bedtime of 7:30pm—but without the paci using a modified CIO approach. But then Beia woke up at 1am. And she cried. And cried. We came in every 10 minutes to soothe her but to no avail. Eventually we gave in and gave her the paci. She fell asleep but the entire day was a wreck (for all of us) as a result.

After consulting other parents and much discussion, we decided that we were over-thinking the matter of the paci. Our new goal is now to optimize the amount of sleep Beia is getting, and hoping that everything else (ie. the 11pm/12am wake up) would sort itself out. So last night we put Beia to bed a 1/2 hour early (with paci)—and she slept straight through to her 2:30am feed! She then went right back to bed (sans paci) until waking up for the day at 6:00am. This is an hour earlier than we'd like, but still considered a success!

So far she is having a much happier day than yesterday, as are we. Hopefully this isn't merely a result of her being over-tired yesterday, and we are going to try the earlier bedtime again tonight. In fact, we are going to try moving her bedtime up a bit more—to either 6:30pm or 6:45pm. Crossing fingers and toes...