First Tooth for Maddie

Maddie apparently broke her first tooth last night. Her night was quite a bit rougher (for me) than her usual sleeping basically 11 or 12 hours in a row. She kept waking up and I would say what I always say "It's not time to get up yet, go back to sleep Maddie." Then she'd go back to sleep for a couple hours and the whole thing would happen again.

Since the time change we don't get her up until 7am earliest. Of course later is she sleeps in later. Today, though, she was pretty adamant about getting up starting around 6am. Usually she's kind of like "ok, I'll just scrape my sheet or play with my blanket and body" and she'll not make any fuss when I tell her it's too early. Today, she wasn't having it. So we got up a bit earlier.

I noticed she was playing with her new tooth a lot by scrapping her tongue over it constantly. And she wasn't the ridiculously happy, cheery baby this morning that she usually is. This is what made me look. And she won't really let us look. Usually she wouldn't care if we would inspect her mouth but not anymore.

I'm very excited for her. I'm also really glad that this is what teething is like. Her being sick is way worst than this. I think I was pretty afraid of what teething would be like.

Day Light Savings Time/Mouth Noises

In general, I think this whole day light savings thing is a big waste of everything. How many people either get more tired than normal or miss important meetings due to this clock change? And for what, exactly? For farmers, I guess. I hope for them it's something that is useful.

There is an upside that I recently discovered. It pushed Maddie's schedule back an hour. So now instead of her getting up at 6am, she's getting up at 7am. And she has no idea. Of course we "moved" her bedtime back an hour too. It's nice because it's that much more time I get to hang out with her after work (1 hour). And it might even cause her morning nap to occur after she gets to the house of the Nanny share. (We were having some issues with her going down to nap and napping through when her child care was supposed to start. I'm against waking her up when she's napping, so we would just wait until she woke up to take her over there. Certainly not a big deal, but it's easier to not have that happen.)

Maddie has pretty consistently been sleeping through from going to bed, around 7pm or later now, until the morning, which is around 7am now. And it's been really nice to not have my sleep interrupted by her anymore. Though it still gets interrupted by other things. I was also worried about night weaning her, but she's been fine with it.

She is so amazing and cute. She's becoming more and more a kid, instead of a baby. Don't get me wrong, she's still very much a baby, but how she plays with the world is becoming so much more interactive. She can crack me up and she's so fun to crack up too. I'm amazed at what she notices. She's growing up!

A while ago she discovered that if she has her mouth on a toy and moves her head side to side while making noise she'd get a cycling sound. Try it with your hand if you want to see what I'm talking about. Well, a couple days ago, I showed her how to do that with my finger going up and down on my lips. She was so excited. So then I started doing it to her, with my finger on her lips and she got it right away. It's so cute because pretty much right away she knows if my finger goes there, she'll start making sound.

On the Verge of Crawling

Maddie so close to crawling. It's pretty fun to watch her progress and sometimes sad to watch her frustration. She's so close!

She reaches forward from sitting pivoting on her still somewhat folded legs pretty consistently but usually either ends up on her belly, or just comes back to sitting. Yesterday I saw her end off the ground with her arms and legs under her. Like a cat. She didn't really know what to do with herself and got really frustrated.

She can also hold herself up standing on her own relatively solidly. I think the biggest thing keeping her from doing that for very long is that she needs both hands to hold herself up and then she doesn't have any entertainment.

I'm really excited to see how her world just opens up when she can get to where she wants to go on her own. It's hard to watch her be frustrated. I wonder if she'll walk or crawl first. I'm guessing crawling, but only time will tell.

This box is full of empty Altoids containers. I was collecting them at work for a while. It's amazing how much of this stuff folks consume. I was thinking it would be an interesting starting point for a crafty project. I started making a mobile by covering these things, but havn't made too much progress on it all.

Rubber Ducky

For the past couple of months I've played the rubber ducky song to Maddie while she takes a bath. I play it on my cell phone.

It's so cute because she gets so excited about it and we always sing along. She uses her voice and it seems like her pitch is getting better, though she's got quite some time to go to match the words. :)

The past couple times I've given her a bath her grabs have had to be diverted. She's getting really fast and really observant of things around her that she doesn't know yet. She has gotten lots of things off the window sill and counter. Most of it really isn't anything to worry about.

It's pretty much time to start bathing her in the bathtub because of what happened tonight though. Tonight she grabbed the hot water handle and turned it on. The faucet wasn't pouring into her tub or anything, but all she would have had to do was put her curious arm out to touch the hot water. The water was hot because I had just filled her tub. Not a good situation.

Maddie and I on a Trip to Japan?!

I've got the travel itch again and the only way to get rid of it is to, well, travel. But it's tough because on the one hand I can't leave Maddie behind yet. I might be able to do an overnight somewhere without her and survive, but I couldn't go much longer than that. And that's way too short to cure the itch. On the other hand, I could bring her with me and... yah! I'll just bring her with me.

So, I was thinking of going to Japan. It's the cleanest and most modern place I would like to currently travel to and I think it's the best choice for Maddie. After talking to several coworkers "in the know" on Friday all of them said "Yes, you should totally go. You won't have any problems being there and getting around with the baby."

The only thing that really scares me is the plane ride over there. It's something like 14 hours long. And that scares me. If she decided that she was unhappy it could get really bad, and I'd feel terrible being "that parent and child" on the plane. But then again, she's totally mellow and a great kid so I'm sure it'll be fine.

Am I crazy? Am I crazy enough to actually go? Would I enjoy the trip as much as I would have pre-baby days? I'm confident it will be a whole new experience.

My Worst Fear Realized

Yesterday we went up to a friends house for their son's 5th birthday party. They just moved to this great big house in Pleasant Hills.

Maddie went down for the night while we were there and we didn't bring our monitor. We were lucky enough, or not, as it turned out, to borrow their old one. She went to sleep on the floor of the parent's room, which happened to be on the other side of the house from where we were all hanging out. My honeypot set up the monitor base and had the other end of the monitor on his pants. I think he even tested it when he was setting it up, I'm not sure though.

A couple hours later another guest at this event came into the kitchen and said that our baby was screaming. (She had gone to the bathroom which is next to the bedroom.) At first I paused because my honeypot was nearby and I could only hear static on the monitor. But then I reacted and ran in there and it was pretty clear that Maddie had been crying for a little while at least. Her neck was sweaty and she was very much worked up compared to how she usually is when she just wakes up and shouts out for some consoling. It took me a couple minutes to calm her down, poor thing. I felt and still feel so terrible.

As it turns out, when the light switch was turned off when she was left asleep in the room, it also turned off the power for the monitor base. Unfortunately that piece of crap monitor receiver doesn't do anything if it can't find the base signal. (Ours will have a red light instead of green and beep every couple of minutes.) Lesson learned: test the monitor with the room in the exact configuration that the baby will be sleeping in, or better yet, stop forgetting ours when there's a chance we'll need it. Hell, I might go buy one just for our "to-go" bag after this. I don't think I could handle having this situation happen again.

One of the things that so sucks about this is that I always have this fear when I'm depending on our monitor at home that it'll fail and our baby will be laying there screaming and nobody will know. It's terrible, and it makes me go check on her when the monitor is just a little to quiet for my comfort. In last nights situation, I was busy hanging out with folks and it was my honeypot's day to be the primary parent, so I wasn't really worrying about it.

My poor baby girl.

Helicopter Parents

I found this great article recently. I think I do okay with not being one of these parents, but it's still pretty early. I do let Maddie fall over and explore her body, and play by herself. When she gets vocally frustrated enough, I'll help her. That's true for any situation all the time.

I've definitely gotten better at letting her overcome physical situations that she doesn't know how to deal with. Many many months ago I would always help her if she seemed frustrated in the slightest. And pretty much anytime she was on her tummy, she'd start grumbling. I soon enough realized that she was never going to get any quality tummy time if I always saved her from her slightest grumblings. I realized I was being a bit extreme.

In fact, just yesterday she wowed me with what she was doing and she did it all by herself. She's sitting and playing with toys and went after a toy that was out of reach. She's leaning forward (too far to get back up to sitting, I think) and ends up on her belly with her legs under her somehow. She looked at me and started whining a little. I looked back at her and told her I wasn't going to help. Then she got up on her hands and had her head up, leaned her head over, pushed her arm forward and kicked her leg up. And bam! she rolled over. And she was so excited! (So was I) This was the first time that I saw her go through this whole sequence of getting from sitting to on her back. And I doubt it would have happened if I had gotten involved.

I think it must help Maddie tons to see Sebastian, her new Nanny share friend, cruising around the house. He's a really solid crawler (and super cute to boot!) and a pretty mellow kid.

I have a game that involved lost of crawling that I started doing a couple months ago to help her see what crawling looks like. She's so freakin cute when we're playing this. I basically pretend I'm a bear or some animal and crawl in circles around her and growl at her and mock bite her arms/legs/body and push her around with my head and give her lots of kisses. It's one of the only guaranteed ways I have of getting her to laugh that hard. Sometimes I do it to her on the changing table too. (She'll always be my cub.)

(Maddie's sitting solidly; has been for a while now. She even is stable with her hands and toys above her head.)

Sleep Progress

I've wanted to share this for a couple days now, but I also really didn't want to jinx what was happening.

Maddie has started only waking up around 5am for a feeding. She'll usually go back to sleep for a couple hours too. So she's going 10 hours or more from the time she goes to bed until she wakes up for that feeding. I'm pretty excited that she's doing this on her own. She's so close to just plain dropping that feeding and sleeping continuously throughout her nighttime.

I previously had a plan to night wean her. Then I decided I'd rather move her into her crib in our room first, and then work on nighttime food consumption. I had heard not to do these at the same time. Since we haven't had a chance to do the rearranging required to get her crib in our room, we haven't done anything at all. One feeding at night is still not that bad, and having it be that late in the night is great.

In other news, Maddie can pretty much sit on her own unsupported and not fall over. I still put a pillow or something behind her in case she does fall over. But she's become a pretty solid sitter.

These pictures are from Willard park in Berkeley. We went there this past weekend.

More Milestones

Maddie's been able to stand, holding on to something, for a month or so now. She's gotten really strong and will grab my shirt collar to support herself without me holding on to her. It's pretty impressive. Lately I've been showing her how to pick up a foot and move it forward and then do the next one while supporting her.

Well, when I came home from work today she was taking steps all by herself! (I was providing support, of course) But I couldn't believe it. I was actually talking to a friend of mine when she started doing this. She ended up "walking" about a couple feet before she stopped doing it. The steps were so cute and small. And the excitement she had was contagious! I'm sure she's starting to realize the power that mobility will provide for her. She'll get to go right to the toys she wants and be able to move around.

We found a permanent family to share our Nanny with and their boy, Sebastian, is about a year old. He's a really good crawler and can get around easily. I'm hoping that he'll influence her to learn how to crawl.

It Isn't Teething, It's An Ear Infection

After another difficult evening, I finally took Maddie to the dr this morning. She has an ear infection and still has a really yuckie cold. Lots of congestion, her nose is like a water fountain, and occasional coughs. Her mood was much better today though.

They told me that they think she's either kicking the ear infection herself, or it's just started because it's small. They wrote me the prescription for the antibiotics, but asked that I wait a day or two and assess if I should give them at all at that time. Basically she said if Maddie seems to get worst, or has another fever give her the drugs.

I appreciate not over prescribing antibiotics, but my draw is to immediately give her to drugs to be done with this once and for all. It's the whole "best for me" over "best for society" as a whole debate. She has had a pretty decent day today. Lots of smiles and fun, and only a little fussier than normal. So I'm going to wait and see.

I have mastered hanging her car seat on the chin up bar. It's a great place to nap because she's sitting upright and she slept like that last night too. She still cries and screams when I do anything that requires her to lay down (changing clothes, changing diapers). And her naps have been good like this.

It Has To Be Teething Time

If this isn't teething, I'm not sure I'll be able to handle the real deal.

Maddie is a mess. She's so unhappy and full of tears. She's so obviously miserable and my once magical comforting powers seem to have disappeared as of late. Last night she was up most of the night. She would try to sleep, and then start writhing and shouting or talking. I could just reach over and rub her tummy a little bit and she'd settle again for another 10 minutes or so. I feel her pain.

Her nose is running like a faucet and she has an infrequent cough. She's sneezing a lot, and every time she does a great big river comes out of her nose. Even in the several hours that she did sleep last night, her nose was making that noise of having stuff in it and having air move forward and back across it.

My poor baby. I pulled out some toys that were in the freezer and the wet washcloth that was in the fridge. The washcloth was a hit. It entertained her for maybe half an hour and she was definitely munching on it. I hope her teething is over soon. I can't stand to see her like this.

Routines

Tonight I had an interesting experience.

We've started to sleep train, just a little bit. I'm not doing scheduled nap times, though I did think about it. I tried it once and it just didn't seem to work well. I think I'm more of the put her down for a nap when she's showing signs of being tired school of thought. From what I've read though, that's apparently too late. Oh well. I'll make a change if I think it's not working for us. What I am doing is following a consistent routine before putting her down for naps.

My husband and I take turns being the primary parent, and today was his day. It doesn't mean that I'm not around or interacting with my daughter. But it does mean that I can go out and run errands alone, or go take a nap without having to make sure he'll watch Maddie. In the same way, when it's my turn, my honeypot can go take his "monkey training classes" or do whatever he'd like without having to wonder if he'll be watching Maddie then. (He often works on the house - yeah!)

Today my honeypot was putting Maddie down for a nap and he just walked over to her crib and put her in it. I asked him to do the routine that we had set up for her naps and he did actually do it. It's an interesting issue because on the one hand I saw how tired she was and I can believe that she would have just gone straight to sleep. But on the other hand, the entire point is to create a consistent routine and have consistent cue's for her so that she knows what's going on. I feel like especially in the early days of implementing this nap routine, it's not a good idea to deviate. But I also understand that maybe the routine isn't necessary. It's hard to know what effect not being completely consistent in something like this really is. I'm pretty sure that the nap routine isn't probably being consistently implemented by our Nanny during the days, but I really don't know that.

The Stillness

When my daughter was first born and younger, she would only take "cat naps" during the day (naps lasting minutes up to 20 minutes), if she would sleep at all. I believe she was around 3 months old when she migrated into sleeping longer blocks of time during the day. She's always been a great night sleeper (except for all the wakups!). And it was around the same time that she dropped down to only requesting one night feeding. It was perfect for me, because I returned to work around that same time.

After she started sleeping longer blocks during the day, it took me a while to figure out that I could actually get something done and I didn't need to just sit somewhere and wait for her to wake up. I was very sleep deprived in the early days, and I would just watch the stillness and the world around me and enjoy the break.

Now that I have these 1 hour blocks or so, I get stuff done. Laundry, dishes, picking up. You know, the normal household stuff. Well, just now Maddie shouted in her sleep (she does this - it's really weird - probably worthy of another post). It's like she's having a bad dream or something because she's completely asleep when I go look at her. Anyway, she just had a couple shouts and she's still asleep. But I was thinking that she would wake up - even though she's probably got another 40 minutes or so. So I sat down and waited. Just like I used to when she only slept for minutes at a time. And I noticed the stillness again. The sounds of the traffic passing our house, the sound of the rain, the brilliance of the sun streaming through the windows, the loud hum of our refrigerator that's probably going to die soon. It's an interesting perspective on the world.

Maddie's First Plane Trip!

We just got back last night from CO. We were there a little shy of a week and it was Maddie's first plane trip. The trip went remarkably well except for one main rough spot.

On the flight there Maddie slept on the empty plane seat for some of the flight and just played with us for the rest of the time. She didn't make any negative noise. (She's still a chatter box!) On the flight back she had a couple small rough periods lasting maybe a minute or two, but otherwise had excellent behavior. Her Dad was even able to get her to lie down and take a nap on his lap. Impressive!

The only real rough spot we had was the fact that except for that extra short nap on the plane there, she didn't sleep the first day. Then she was so over tired that she was weirdly cranky even into the next day. She would scream when you would just lay her on her back (which makes it difficult to change her clothes or her diaper). So I finally reached a point, after saying several times - "I've never seen her like this" where I forced her to nap. I did the same 5 minute check in thing I had done before and she eventually went down. It was painful because it wasn't just a couple minutes of unhappy behavior. I'm sure it was much more difficult being in a new place with new smells. But she did great and once she started sleeping again, she was again the fantastic happy baby that we all love. (We love the cranky one too - we just prefer the fantastic happy one!)

Today when I put her down for her nap, she went down with no protests and fell asleep right away. It was nice. I took this time to write this post and to write out her nap winddown routine. I'm going to work with our Nanny to get her napping better with her too because she usually doesn't sleep too much with her.

Madelyn is Eating Solid Foods

We start feeding Maddie solid foods at the end of December. The 28th, I believe.

She really likes eating. I guess I was expecting it to be challenging to get a baby to eat. But not with her. She's very excited to eat. And I'm impressed with how much she eats in a sitting.

So far she's eaten sweet potato, pear, rice cereal, avocado and squash.

In this picture we were eating rice cereal.

Sleep Training?

It used to be that Maddie would show signs of tiredness and we would wind down some and then put her down mostly awake.

Recently, she's started resisting sleep. She cries if we put her down to sleep and sounds like we're torturing her. So of course we pick her back up and either give up if it's a nap or try again later. Also, she usually doesn't sleep much with her Nanny during the day which means she can be very fussy in the few hours each night that I get to see her. This is not ideal.

I've been reading quite a bit about sleep and about how about this age they get separation anxiety and still don't have object permanence. So they don't want to be away from you (in their crib before they fall asleep) and they don't actually know that you haven't disappeared when they can't see you. It's kind of weird reality to exist in if you think about it. One of the other things I've run across is how bad it is for kids to not really sleep enough. It affects all sorts of things, not to mention that they're kind of fussy and short fused.

A couple days ago I put Maddie down for a nap and she was clearly tired. She cried and was so upset. I tried to comfort her without picking her up and then I did pick her up and tried winding her down again. That was terrible and didn't work at all. It just made her cry more when I did put her down. My honey pot was around and he didn't like that she was upset and picked her up and basically did the same things. Then he had a class to go to and left me with her after it being an hour or so of this terrible situation. So I decided to try some of the stuff I've read in this pretty decent sleep book.

I wound her down again, explaining what we were doing. Then I put her in her crib and left the room knowing that I would check in every 5 minutes. That was a pretty terrible 5 minutes. I went to check in with her and left again and she was asleep one minute later. 6 minutes total.

Today, we also had some rough naps. I guess rough is relative when I have an associate that said their baby cried for 90 minutes the first time. I've started doing some of the things in there which basically equate to sleep training. I've only done it for naps. Basically I wind her down and then put her in her crib and just let her cry. I check in every 5 minutes. The first time I did this she sounded so upset for several minutes, but she did go to sleep within 6 minutes.

Grow Grow Grow

Maddie is growing up so fast!
She can roll over with some prompting. She can strongly stand on her feet. And in the past week or so she's gotten so that she can hold on to things (us, her locked stroller) and keep herself standing up. It's pretty amazing.

Her chicken wing has come back, this time she does it with her arm straight. So she ends up beating on whatever is in front of her with her flopping left arm. Usually she does this when she's drinking from her bottle. I haven't seen her do it with her left arm yet.

She still has a single night feeding, which we will begin weaning her from when we get back from our CO trip next week. Assuming that goes ok, we're going to start the process of moving her out of our bed and into her own crib in our room. I'm hoping that these changes go well and aren't too traumatic for her and/or us.

We started solid foods last week. So far she's eaten sweet potato, pear, avocado and rice cereal. She seems to be enjoying it.

She's such a happy baby. I would hate to spoil that. She smiles often and goes to sleep and takes naps relatively painlessly. She's getting so much smarter and she seems to understand so much more. And it takes quite a bit more effort to entertain her than it used to.

She babbles so much. I think she's really taken it up a notch in the past week or so. She's always been kind of vocal. I suppose some of that has to do with all of us talking to her all the time.

I think we really have done a good job with her, and that we got very lucky with our Nanny. I think that it's the combination of our good care that has gotten her to where she is now. Thank you Clelia!

Very Surprised

I'm one of those parents that think that babies understand a lot more than we give them credit for. This is why I try to keep a near constant chatter going of what we're doing where we're going, etc.

One piece of evidence that confirms my thoughts is the "legs down" of diaper changing. Pretty much from the start of doing diaper changes I would say "legs down, please" a number of times to attempt to get Maddie to straighten her legs while I finish fastening her diaper and diaper cover. I would say it while I would gently push her legs down if she didn't do it on her own. It didn't take long, maybe under a week, before she would straighten her legs and hold them like that for a minute or so when I would say "legs down, please." She might have been a month old or less when this started. I remeber being impressed at how small she was when she started doing that. What is language besides associations between sounds and meanings?

I sing the bus song with Maddie a couple times a day and move her arms with the song. ("The wheels on the bus go round and round...) She loves it! I love it! It's fun times and it makes her so excited and happy when we do it. Maddie (and probably all babies) don't have the longest attention spans. They gaze all around and turn their heads and check out their worlds. Well, yesterday I came home from work and Maddie was in her rocker. She was checking out the world, turning her head, not really paying attention to me directly and I sang and held the first note of this song. I've never seen her move so fast. Her head turned to face me and she got this huge smile; she knew exactly what was happening. It really caught me by surprise how quickly she focused on me and became so excited.

This is why I'm really loving having Maddie in my life. It's so amazing to watch her learn and be herself.

Sleep

It seems that our little munchkin has been working on sleeping through the night.

Four days ago she slept 11 hours straight, and then the past couple of nights she slept 7 or 8 hours straight. Last night was an exception; she was back to waking up twice. Once at 1:30 AM and the second time around 5 AM. But you have to take a step back to keep going forward.

I can handle waking up once. I just make sure I also go to sleep early so I can be sleeping during that longer block of time.

Also, a couple weeks ago she started really having a predictable bedtime. She goes down for the night around 7 or 8PM.

I'm looking forward to the days when she dependably will sleep through the night. Though I'm told this will disappear when she starts teething.

I also feel really fortunate that she can go to sleep pretty easily. Sometimes she'll have her "suck" on; when her sucking reflex is really strong and it's clear through attempts at feeding that she's not hungry. We'll give her a pacifier at these times in an attempt to prevent her from getting in the habit of sucking on her hands. But frequently I can put her down for the night without anything and she'll fall asleep without sucking on anything. It's pretty cool. We only put her down to sleep if she's showing signs of being tired.

Smiles and Hands

Madelyn has been finding her hands recently. She actually found them a couple weeks ago now, but has been getting really good at using them. We have this rattle that I can hold in front of her and she'll actually grab it. She's also become pretty proficient at getting her fist in her mouth.

She's also so extremely smiley. I love the huge grins she gives me, pretty much anytime I see her. She makes me smile really large too. Who could help themselves? I also love the power of suggesting that I have where I can smile large at her and she'll smile back, even if she's not in the best of moods. Though she's such a happy baby most of the time.

This picture isn't even her smiling big. This is just a casual smile. If her eyes were squinted shut, then you'd know she's smiling big.