Lauren’s appointment went well this morning – she’s 12 lbs. 4 oz., 24″ long – tall and skinny   Her weight is about 60th percentile, and height is 90th percentile.  She absolutely HATED her shots…she was very angry after getting stabbed…but she’s doing okay now.

Peyton also got checked out – it seems he had a bit of the stomache flu.  He hasn’t had any…incidents…since yesterday am, but he says his stomache is still hurting a little bit.  Once the doctor told him he was okay, he stopped whining so much.  I think he realized that he could get a lot of extra attention for being sick, so the last two days he’s taken to dramatically clutching his stomache and falling to the floor in a heap of moans.

On an unrelated note, oldnavy.com has some of the cutest baby outfits EVER.  I’m trying to have some self-control here, but I’ve finally got a little girl to dress up, and our planned vacations to CA in June and Jersey in August are VERY tempting excuses…not to mention the fact that Lauren is likely to switch clothing sizes somewhere in the middle, so whatever we buy for CA won’t fit in Jersey…I also found some clothes for myself…of course, since I’m hoping to be a stay-at-homer next year, I’ll need new work clothes…my current work clothes wouldn’t be appropriate   I guess it’s a good thing I have a few old navy gift cards around here

News brief:

Peyton is ill.  Doctor visit tomorrow.  Poor guy!  He’s been sleeping a lot to recover.  No fever, just…digestive issues you’d rather not read about.

Lauren is well (for the time being – please don’t share your disease, brother!).  She sleeps well at night – 7:30 -5:30 or 6:30.  We figure this will be interrupted when we make our trip to CA after classes get out this semester.  Daddy’s driving back with Uncle Tyler; Mommy and kids plan to stay an extra week and fly back.  Those who want to see us while we’re there, email me!

Now that Lauren sleeps well, Mommy sleeps well (1st time in 11 months!).

Daddy never stopped sleeping well.

I was quite proud of Peyton the other morning.  Usually he has to warn us before he runs to the bathroom to use the toilet.  Saturday morning I walked past the bathroom and noticed he was using the restroom, so I congratulated him for going all by himself without even coming to tell us first.

Then I saw that he was not only peeing, but he was also brushing his teeth.

Wow.  I love to multi-task, but I never thought I’d see those two activities combined.

[Random unrelated pictures]

Lauren hadn’t been sleeping well in our bed anymore, so I watched the mail every day, waiting for my copy of the book “The Moms on Call Guide to Basic Baby Care.”  I heard about it on the Family Life segment on the radio a few weeks ago; it’s written by two pediatric nurses/mothers who have been there and done that.  On the radio they talked about how to swaddle and they talked about getting baby to sleep through the night, plus the book discusses all other issues about how to deal with various common illnesses or other questions moms might have.

My book came in the mail on Friday, but I was too tired that evening to read it, so I spent a few minutes on Saturday memorizing the bedtime chapter, getting ready to put their plan into action.

The plan was much like what we did with Peyton at 9 months old when his life was interrupted.  When I went back to work, even though he’d been sleeping through the night for months, he suddenly decided he needed to wake up every two hours.  Yes, every two hours.  I indulged him – so he loved mommy helping him fall asleep as I trained him to expect it.  This went on for two or three exhausting weeks.  By then I had read a few different articles about getting a baby to sleep through the night, so I followed their advice and let him cry.  The first night was tough.  The second night, not so tough.  By the third night, he had re-trained himself to fall asleep on his own. 

We used the same plan with Peyton when he was 18 months and switched into a regular bed.  And again when he was 2 years old and uninterested in (but still needed) naptime.  Nanny 911 or the Supernanny also make use of this plan.

But can a 2 1/2 month old baby learn it, too?  A newborn can fall asleep on her own, but we train our kids to need us to put them to sleep.  It’s time to re-train Lauren.

We did.  Lauren didn’t like being put into bed awake…when the other option is Mommy or Daddy rocking you to sleep, who would?  But it’s not good for her to depend on us to put her to sleep when she is perfectly capable of doing that herself…especially since she loses sleep during the night from waking up so often (almost every two hours lately!).  Now that she’s on a pretty regular routine as far as bedtime goes, it’s time to teach her to fall asleep and stay asleep.  Also, she’s heavy enough that she should be able to sleep through the night, so we launched in with complete confidence in our little girl.

Even though Lauren didn’t like being put to bed awake, she quickly adapted to the change.  She cried at varying levels for probably 20 minutes, stopping as soon as I arrived to pat her back for a minute every five minutes or so.  After the third time I went in there and left, she put herself to sleep.  She woke up at 12:30 and 3:00, but the book recommended that we wait 5 minutes before going in to see if baby was really hungry or just wanting someone else to put them back to sleep.  Lauren wasn’t crying very loudly, so I let her be – she’d cry for a minute, then lie quietly for a minute, then cry again, for probably 10 minutes each time before she fell asleep again.  At 5:30 I figured she probably was hungry, so I took her in our bed; even though I didn’t fall back asleep after that, she did and I was able to take a shower in peace  

Tonight we followed the routine again (bath or wipe-down, eat, swaddle, lights out, white noise and bed) and she only cried at a whimper for 7 minutes – I didn’t even get a chance to go in there.  She’s a fast learner – hopefully during the night she’ll do the same. 

I’m so glad we started this – she was so happy today!  She’s typically pretty mellow, but she took fewer naps today, stayed awake for longer periods of time, and was still happy! 

And who’s going to be sleeping through the night soon?  Me!  I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in 11 months!  Lauren’s not the only one benefiting here!

I’m thinking about getting Lauren’s ears pierced.  I had mine pierced when I was a couple months old, and it was kind of nice being able to wear earrings without remembering the pain of getting them done as a child.  Also, since I was so little when they were pierced and I wore earrings non-stop for the first few years of life, by the time it was my turn to care for them, it was easy.  I even left my earrings out for years at a time and they’ve never grown closed. 

We’ll probably be in Bellingham some time this weekend – maybe I’ll ask a few questions while we’re there.

Although Lauren may be old enough to get earrings, she isn’t quite old enough yet to sleep through the night.  Sigh.  She gave me a few nice nights, but typically she still wakes up every 3 hours.  Her evening has become more predictable, though, and she’s ready for bed at around the same time Peyton is.  I’ve been putting her in her own bed for all of her naps and in the beginning of the evening, and when I put her down she’s still somewhat awake, so she’s learning to self-soothe.  But during the night I’m so tired I don’t think – I just take her out of her bed and into ours.  I’m pretty sure that being in our bed is what causes her to wake up more often because when she’s been sleeping close to me for two hours and I roll onto my other side, she wakes up. 

I’ve decided that if I had a nice rocking chair in her room I’d be more likely to sit down and feed her in her room rather than taking her into our bed.  The chair in her room is wood and has no padding, plus it creaks, so at midnight when I wake up after sleeping for one hour, the fact that the chair even exists is unknown to me.  My soft warm bed is much more appealing…until I gradually become fully alert due to the throbbing of my uncomfortable arm. 

So maybe while we check into earrings we’ll also watch for a new rocker.

Oh, and did I mention that it snowed today?  Hailed too, for a few minutes – Peyton went outside singing “If all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops, oh what a rain that would be!  Standing outside with my mouth open wide – ah, ah-ah ah, ah-ah ah, ah-ah ah…”  It’s a good thing the hail was only mini-jawbreaker sized, or his song would have ended “ow! Ow-ow ow, ow-ow ow, ow-ow ow!!!”

I mentioned in a much earlier post that I’d blog on the creation of Lauren’s valance, so here goes…

We bought a crib set for Lauren from babies r us.  The set came with one valance, sized for a picture-size window.  Lauren’s window is double that, so we had the piece hanging up over half of her windows for several weeks while I contemplated what to do.  I didn’t really want to spend the 20 or 30 plus shipping to get another one, but it was so dang cute I didn’t want to just put it away.

Then I had an epiphany -

The crib skirt.  It perfectly matched the valance, with the exception of the purple bands that the valance hangs from (a style that I wasn’t crazy about anyway).  The crib skirt has 4 sides, but one side would always be against the wall, so I could cut it off and no one would know! 

I measured the length, and it was perfect!  I cut off the purple bands and sewed a piece of scrap fabric to the back so the valance would have something to hang from, and wallah – and only a trained eye will see that the original valance had little purple bands on the top. 

I’m quite pleased   My current sewing project – I make baby towels out of a regular-sized towel and wash cloth.  I recently made one to gift a friend who had a baby and Peyton saw me making it.  He insisted that Dylan get one to match the one I made for Peyton (that Lauren now uses).  Peyton picked out some of my spare fabric and I created the “washcloth” head-piece, so now I just need to finish the “towel” body piece and sew them together.

In ALL the free time I have.

Peyton found the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour CD and insisted on listening to it…not only does he love the music, but he insists that I’m wrong about the lyrics.  Here are his versions of the songs from that CD and a few others -

Soda….the Magical mystery toy is coming to take you away…

Maybe I’m a Richmond, maybe I’m a Richmond, maybe I’m a Richmand, too.

I want you to know [your mother] I want you to know.

 I say hello, you say no, I say stop, and I say go, go, go, (oh-oh) oh no – you say g’bye, and I say hello, hello, hello

Coo-Coo-Kachoo, coo-coo-kachoo, coo-coo-kachoo kachoo!

One of the cutest songs that he gets [mostly] right is Aerosmith’s “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”  He was singing it emphatically to Lauren the other day – “Cuz’ I miss you, baby, and I don’t wanna miss anything!”

I just asked him to sing me some more of the Beatles’ songs, and he said, “But I don’t know any of the other ones, so you better talk to the Beatles right now to see what they’re doing.  Are they farming, or singing?  Farming means going to the pool or getting a drink, or…whatever.”

One more – on Sunday as we arrived at church, Peyton asked if there’d be Sunday school.  When I said yes, he replied “Yay!!!  Teachers!!!!”

(But when I told his teachers what he’d said he got embarrassed and threw a fit).

Heard over the baby monitor while Peyton and Daddy changed Lauren’s diaper and Mommy finished eating her hard-boiled eggs and salad:

P:  Daddy, mommy said I could have some egg with my dinner.  Egg is healthy, right Daddy?

D:  Oh?  Yeah!

P:  I had salt on my egg, Dadda.  Salt is healthy for you, right Daddy?

D:  Oh?  Yeah!

P:  Salt is REALLY healthy for you.  Can you say healthy, Daddy?  Heallllllllllllllllllllthy.

D:  Oh, is it?

P:  Dadda, can you say [gibberish]?

Bottle feeding went absolutely nowhere today. 

Maybe tomorrow I’ll dip the nipple in sugar.

Days ’til starvation: 2

Last night I stayed up late reading the last novel in Dee Henderson’s O’Malley series.  I’m not sure whether I fed Lauren in my sleep and don’t remember because I was so tired, or if maybe she actually slept a LOOOONG stretch for the first time since the few days after birth, but the earliest I remember waking up with her was at 5:30 this morning. 

So tonight she’s sleeping in her crib   We started working on a bedtime routine - bath/wipe-down, change, eat, book, sleep.  Hopefully those cues will let her know it’s time to sleep (and stay asleep).  We’ve been pretty unstructured with bedtime thus far (hey, if I nurse her in the living room with all the lights on I can read another chapter of one of Henderson’s suspense novels…and as she falls asleep on me I can read just one more page…okay, maybe two or three…chapters…), so I’m looking forward to getting her onto a bit of a schedule, at least for bedtime.  I still enjoy letting her nap on my while I rest in the afternoon (after finishing a few more pages of my book, of course) because she is just SO snugly!  Daddy experienced her snuggliness when he let her nap on his chest for the first time since who knows when, but when she was sleeping on my yesterday and Daddy tried to take her for himself, she wasn’t so happy   Here’s a pic I managed to snap when she DID enjoy sleeping on Daddy:

Bottle feeding is…going.  If Lauren could speak she would say that she wished it were going out the window, but I’m just as stubborn as my children (where do you think they got it from?).  We’ve tried every bottle available with little success.  I say little because I did find a bottle by First Starts at Target that’s marketed to breast-fed babies and Lauren actually drank from that bottle.  For a day.  The next day she treated it just like all the rest.  It did seem to solve some of the issues I noticed – the nipple has just the right amount of squishiness (as opposed to the hard avent nipple or the overly-soft nipple on the first adiri bottle I bought), so it’s easier for her to latch on to it properly.  The other limited success we’ve had has been with Avent’s sippy lid…she seems like she’s tolerant of it, but it’s harder for her to latch on to since it’s flat and stiff.  Also, the flow is probably a lot faster because it’s a sippy, and I think there might be a lot of air in it because of how it works, so we’re going to keep trying with the bottle that she took.

Countdown ’til starvation if she won’t take it: 4 days.  Friday night James and I are heading to an 80s birthday party…we can probably make it back early enough if necessary, but it’d be nicer if we didn’t have an early curfew.  At the latest, Saturday will be a trial – I’m due to teach the SAT prep class again, and Lauren will definitely need a bottle then.  If she won’t then I’m going to find a sitter in Bellingham because then I can nurse before and after without a problem, but the extra hour of driving makes a bottle necessary when she’s at home.  Daddy doesn’t like to give her the bottle if she fusses, so she’ll have to be a pro at it by then to avoid a sitter.

Pray for us!

Oh, and have I published this picture yet?