Sleep....the final frontier

Oh the sleep subject. The center of our universe for the last 2 months....it is IMPROVING but slowly. We are currently on night 8 of letting her "cry it out" with regular check ins. We have gone from crying virtually all night long on night 1 (I think we got maybe 2 hours of sleep) to last night's almost personal best of 11 hours straight! There is still at least 20-40 minutes of crying (tonight was 28 mins - not bad) when we first put her down in her crib (yes, we broke down and got one, but it has made a huge difference) and she is still waking up around 4 or 5am and refuses to go back to sleep at that point (so we bring her into bed, nurse her and sometimes she falls back asleep, sometimes not). We are trying to push her whole cycle back an hour so that it's more like 7 to 7 instead of 6 to 6 like it is now, but that's really hard to do. She has been sleeping really, really well (like 10+ hours a night) for several nights now. But she still fights it. Most of the time she falls asleep like she just fell face first from sitting. This is an awkward yoga-like pose where she looks like she's sitting on her butt and touching her toes. Doesn't seem comfortable but she sleeps like that for hours. The naps are still VERY difficult to nail down and that's where we are starting to focus our attention. She just fights naps tooth and nail. Might miss something. Doesn't want to be alone. Whatever the reason, she is a terrible nap taker right now. Oftentimes we have to resort to drives in the car or long walks in the backpack to put her down. Naps and nights are strongly linked and if you improve one you're supposed to improve the other. Right now, her naps are getting worse...but we're working on it. So, all in all, definitely improving...just slowly and with difficulty. She's done SUCH a great job adjusting to this and we are really, really proud of her (and ourselves sometimes).

Her dramatic and continuous changes are astounding. She is more like a toddler EVERYDAY! Pulling herself up on couches, nightstands, parents. Hanging on with one hand while the other explores. Letting go sometimes to teeter for a split second of standing bliss before crashing on her juicy booty to the ground....only to immediatley grab something to pull herself up again to practice more. She knows the signs for milk, food, up, water, drink, bird, mama, papa. She's learning dog, cat, more, finshed, bath and sleep. She has made the sign for milk and up and we think she's really close to waving bye and hi. We are trying to feed her solids three times a day. Recently she just has not been that into them. Today for some reason, she ate two cherries, some watermelon and a quarter of a banana. Hard to predict. We ordered a high chair and it should be in soon. When it arrives, we'll have much more of a station for feedings. Right now we just kind of chase her around the house as she's crawling trying to convince her she really wants this spoonful of food more than that dust bunny, random piece of dropped paper or fire grate. She has been REALLY into papa recently and loves to play with me for long periods of time (i'm the 'fun' one). We wrestle, play horse and airplane, go outside and play in the flowers, read books, play with toys, play with food, water the garden, make faces, laugh, zerberts, ticklings...She is becoming more intensely interested in books and looks at our face/mouths when we read words off the page. We swear she's tried to say dog and ball already! She claps, giggles, laughs out loud, squeals, babbles, sings, crawls, protests, expresses desires, cuddles, hugs, sticks out her tongue, makes raspberries...

Finally, our camera has crapped out and that's why there hasn't been any new photos or videos in quite some time. We apologize. It's been sent off and should be repaired soon! We miss it too.