Sleeping and Other Adventures

Just in case you are curious, this amazing thing happens when you add a baby to the family.  For reasons I don’t understand, the other kids can sleep through her cries in the middle of the night!

I fully believe the new swing set helps our big girls to get to sleep!  I’m so glad twelve family members worked together for a Christmas gift so that our family can enjoy swinging nearly every day!!!  I love that it is a gift they use all the time, and it doesn’t take up more closet space!!!

A few days ago I woke from a nap to find that everyone in the house was asleep during rest time.  In the living room Kyle was on the couch.  Next to him in the bouncer was this sleeping bundle of joy.  The infant hats aren’t made for any of my girls.  They are just too small!  This one is supposed to fit in a couple of months!

Lydia is starting to have some awake time.  I caught her right before her rest time.  Sorry the image is slightly blurry.  It turned out that I only had about two minutes before she wanted to nap.

When I was pregnant with Eliana, I started reading two books about babies.  They completely disagreed, and that totally overwhelmed me.  Kyle told me to put them away and we’d figure it out when the baby got here.  So, we had a disaster with sleep deprivation making a mess in our lives for many, many months.  Among other things, I didn’t know that babies have sleep cycles where they might fuss for a few minutes between their two kinds of sleep.  They are asleep and don’t need to be picked up and fed.

While I was pregnant with Natalie, I asked my friend April about how Sofia slept as a baby.  With her wonder stories, I decided to read Babywise by her recommendation.  We didn’t strickly follow the guidelines, but we made HUGE progress with Natalie.  In general, I wasn’t up to waking her at a certain time to start a morning routine.  But once she was up, we flowed from there.  We’d wake her for day time feedings, nurse, have some awake time, and worked to lay her down while she was sleepy but not totally asleep.  She still nursed during the night at least once until about a year, but I was okay with that because it took about 2o minutes from the time she got up until I was fast asleep again.

With Lydia we are following the same wake the baby by the third hour to feed during the day.  There have been three of the seven nights of her life in which she has only woke for feedings and not in between needing to be cuddled or consoled.  This is GLORIOUS!!!  Last night was the most amazing.  She woke for a feeding at 8:15 pm.  She was pretty sleepy and didn’t nurse well.  We bathed her which woke her quite a bit.  I finished nursing her.  She settled down about 9:30ish or so.  She didn’t wake until 12:45!  Then, to my amazement, she didn’t wake again until 5:55 am.  I’m not used to getting this much sleep this early on!  I hope and pray it continues!!!

Just in case you’re wondering, not every night is so smooth.  Two nights ago she got a “bath” from wipes after going through her diaper, onesie, sleeper, and sleep sack.  She was then wide awake for another hour and a half after her feeding.  She wasn’t fussy, just wanting to be awake while I started a load of laundry, and then cuddled.

Oh, outside, I do miss you!  I’m glad Kyle captured this shot.  There are some days I only see outside through the windows.  I’m working to get outside more each day.