First day of school and Erica's curl

Well this will be short because I am fairly exhausted and you would think Erica would be exhausted too but she is giving me a run for my money tonight and Russell is working late.  So let's just put it this way...  She's A Tough Cookie.  She cried quite a lot and I cried privately inside my office right across the hall from her class even with the door closed I could hear her and it nearly drove me to insanity.

Enjoy her little curl.  I am not officially saying she will have curly hair, but this one appeared after taking off her winter hat this afternoon.

Erica to start school tomorrow

Erica is going to start coming with me to Parents' Day Out on Mondays, starting tomorrow.  It will be an adventure for both of us.  For Erica, it will be a long day in a classroom with two teachers and up to five other babies, mostly who have already turned one year old and are walking.  For me, I will get to wonder how she's doing and definitely hear her if she cries because her classroom is right across from my office.  Yikes.  Pray for us, OK?

Well, we trusted our pediatrician and have carried on with sleep training.  Erica has really learned to go to bed drowsy and put herself to sleep the rest of the way.  Sometimes she can even put herself back to sleep if she wakes up.  You notice the word, "sometimes."  Other times, like the past two nights, she was woken up shrieking and not been able to put herself back to sleep.  Therefore, we, her parents, have helped her.  That is how we love her, helping her learn and adjust and get through the hard times.

We just love her soooooooooooooooooo much!

The spoon feeding hasn't been any more exciting.  She doesn't seem to really want anything badly enough to work it into a final swallow.  Most of the food ends up spit back out or played with in her hands.  Maybe she will go straight to finger foods.  She loves to put Cheerios in her mouth and sometimes she actually swallows them.  Today I tried little chunks of banana (sorry Aunts Laura and Nette) and she thought that was pretty cool.

Another think Erica is working on is rolling over. She doesn't like it.  The best that she does is dive off the boppy when she is propped up on it, and then roll herself onto her tummy to try and reach something.  

She also love tags.  Anything with a tag!  The most exciting Christmas toys all over the house, boppy, blankets, anything... she goes for the tag.  Yesterday I even propped her up on the boppy tummy side down because she wanted to reach the tag and it helped distract her for a good five minutes. 

Sleep Camp Was Worth It

We really tried to believe everyone who told us that Erica learning to sleep on her own would be well worth the work it required.  I think it was just one of those things we had to wait to truly believe until we experienced it.  I am so proud of our little sleeping angel.  She still isn't perfect with her naps, but they are getting so much better.

Now that she has been sleeping better, I want to really get her on a great schedule with nice 12 hour nights, 2 hour morning naps, and 2 hour afternoon naps.  I will call it Intermediate Baby Sleep Camp for baby who has some beginner skills but needs to master some more advanced ones.

Erica is also learning to like solid foods!  She has tried bananas, sweet potatoes, and oatmeal cereal.  She likes them in descending order.

This is getting boring so I will stop for now.

Baby Sleep Camp Day Three: Maybe she is learning this...

Oh, it just hurts me every time I leave her in her bed and she cries.  How does she know how to make me want to quit this stupid plan every time?   Welllll, darling little sweet pink baby has no idea of this plan and I really think if she DID have any idea, it would be that she is a growing smart girl who CAN learn to fall asleep by herself!  I think it must be working, but it is SO HARD.  I have been home alone today with three awful naps.  This one might be sticking better than the others.  She woke up after 20 minutes but I went in and told her she was OK and she eventually went back to sleep. We've never done that before!

Now I'm waiting for my Valentine to arrive with my well-deserved Sonic surprise.

The Hardest Night

The title of this post really might be an exaggeration.  I think there were harder nights when Erica was two or three months old and up crying for reasons we couldn't understand for hours we couldn't endure.  The Night I'm describing here was really one hour and twenty minutes of sadness and then another nine hours (so far) of sleeping baby bliss.

Russell and I have been proud to brag that Erica has been sleeping through the night since she was seven weeks old.  This is true!  At least five or six nights a week, sometimes more, Erica has been sleeping in her own bed alone for at least seven hours.  We continued to have problems with napping, but really felt like the nights were good.

Erica has had problems with sleeping on trips (horrible nights on trips to TX and AL) and she has trouble napping at Grandma's/Grandpa's house and friend Amy's house for babysitting.  At home she sometimes takes one one-hour nap in the morning, but usually the rest of her naps are barely twenty minutes.  It can be exhausting.

We talked with the pediatrician about it on a visit to check Erica's ears after some particularly bad days and nights of sleeping.  She suggested it was time for "Baby Sleep Camp."  What????? My baby has to go to camp?  No.  We learned a technique of helping the baby learn to fall asleep on her own.  We are supposed to rock her for a little while, but not all the way to sleep as we had been doing.  Put her in her bed awake, then tell her night-night and leave.  She will scream and we will die of torture listening to her.  Then we can go check on her every five minutes and reassure her and she will eventually fall asleep.  Do this for a week and this doctor has never known any baby not to succeed after one week.

One Week!  Are you crazy??????  But we agreed it was a good idea to try "one day."

Here are our reasons we hadn't tried it until last night:

1. Dr. suggested we put it on the calendar and not try it if we were going to be going out of town.  We had a trip to Birmingham planned.

2. I have two days off next week so we thought we would wait until I would be home from work to do the daytime napping part of the sleep camp.

3. We didn't wanna yet.

4. It hurt our hearts to think about doing it yet.

5. She was really sleeping fine most nights and we were enduring the naps as best we could.

6. Maybe she would wonder if we loved her.

7. Lots of other procrastinating reasons.

8. Maybe one of the websites I read was right, that when babies are left to CIO (Cry It Out), they finally give up and go to sleep because they figure their parents will never help them anyway.  Duh.

9. I decided I needed more pediatrician advice so I emailed a friend's wife who I used to babysit for and liked their babies' bedtime routine.

Well the clincher was probably that friend writing us back with --- practically word-for-word identical -- the same advice as our pediatrician.  Plus we had it invisibly on our calendar for this Thursday night.

So we agreed to try it for her late afternoon nap.  At 4:30 I fed Erica, and then we went to the International Market for some produce.  She acted subdued and ready for a nap while we were out and about, so we made our bedtime routine plan and sent Russell upstairs with Erica.

Read two books, sing one song, and put Erica in her bed awake.  Then the crying started.  This was 6:40 PM. 

Not easy.

We hate this.

We can't do this.

OK, five minutes have passed, Russell went in to reassure her, picked her up because he forgot that Not Picking Her UP was part of the drs.' advice.

Lots and lots more five-minute segments passed.  These were timed on the kitchen timer.  We took turns going in to reassure her.  Most times she didn't even quiet down when we went in to check. She just flapped her arms around and screamed madder and madder.

Side note:  I think the way she cried made it a little easier than it would have been even a month ago.  She sounded slightly in control of herself, not even screeching like she was sick or anything.  Just a constant, "I'm tired and mad and stubborn" cry.  Made me think she could get through this and wasn't really in pain or anything.  Except it was still awful and terrible.  I never enjoyed doing dishes so much as I did last night, drowning out the sound of her crying when it wasn't my turn upstairs.

One hour passed.  Can we still do this?  The second pediatrician said his first daughter cried one hour and forty four minutes the first night.  We said we could try it that long.  We never really came up with a plan of what we would do or when we would give up.

Once I was sending a friend a note on Facebook and I was watching the timer and listening to Erica quiet down 10 seconds before that five minute segment was over.  I even typed to my friend that I thought Erica had gone to sleep.  Fifty two seconds later she was screaming again.  Then I think it was only two five minute segments after that and she was asleep for the night.  

Of course we didn't know she was asleep for the night.  It was 7:00 PM and I told Russell that even if she only slept for ten minutes I would get her up if she cried and she would at least have fallen asleep on her own for a little while.  She never woke up.   It is 4:20 AM and I am a crazy person writing a blog when I could be happily asleep because my baby is happily asleep.

There has to be a gospel message here somewhere.  Now I might try to go to sleep again.

Well I thought I would write a quick catch-up blog but now Erica is waking up from her little nap.  That is OK, though because she slept for 10 1/2 hours last night!  Yippeeedoodliedoo!  Say that out loud!

She is just the sweetest little thing.  I will upload a couple more pics just for fun:)

My Sweet Girl and her New Hobby

Erica is learning to sit up by herself and she has taken quite an interest in toys and books from this position.  I guess when she was laying down all the time or being held, she didn't have much independence to explore her toys and books or choose which ones she wanted to examine further.  When she is at Mom and Dad's house, they have a little basin with toys in it that she plays with.  At home this morning I set up a plastic bowl from the kitchen with some toys and let her explore.  I was sitting on the couch next to her making a call for work.  My work notebook was still on the couch when I stepped a few feet away to start folding laundry.  I watched Erica eyeing that composition book, about two feet away from where she was sitting.  She leaned over to try and pick it up, but ended up diving on top of the book and flipping herself forward onto her tummy.  She didn't like that very much, started crying for help so I picked her back up into the sitting position.  Wouldn't you believe as soon as I stepped back to the laundry, she dove right back on top of that notebook!  I called Mom and Dad to tell them about her mischief, and they suggested I put a pile of her own books in front of her to go through.  She has been paging through them for about 15 or 20 minutes now.  Very very cute.  She must be a genius.