Five Months

Amelia is five months old today! Happy March 5th, Little A.

I know I haven’t been writing much. Amelia-at-four-months has come and gone without much documentation. But she is a Q.T. Pie. She smiles all the time and is beginning to laugh a lot. She pulled herself up from a reclining position into a sitting position the other day—so exciting!!!—and she is working hard on learning to roll over. She makes a variety of noises, including squeals, squeaks, shrieks, cackles, grunts, and a Marge Simpson-esque grummbly hum. She gets visibly excited about new toys and new events: her eyes light up and she kicks her feet and waves her arms with joy. And she has started to notice Suki; this morning she was whooping and clutching for Suki’s fur while I brushed her.

Dean and I have made some strides in integrating having a baby into our lives, too. For the past two Fridays, I’ve taken Amelia to the grocery store. This gives me and A something to do and gets what used to be a weekend chore over with before the weekend. I think A actually really likes the grocery store, and if I put her in the Ergo I can get what I need with two hands. And we’ve taken some longer outings with Amelia on the weekends. I think we will do that more and more as spring arrives. (I can’t wait. I am so sick of cold and wind.)

I wish I did a better job of documenting A’s babyhood. One of the main inspirations for this blog is Liz of AD and BC, a wonderful friend and my go-to person for all things baby. She has done a great job of documenting her son Oliver's progress on her blog. It's very reassuring to me to be able to go to her blog and look up what Ollie was doing at Amelia's age. It makes me feel like I am on the right track.

I was looking at AD a lot last week to see what Liz did as far as starting Oliver on solids, and then I read about his sleep at 4-5 months. I was glad to see that his sleep habits weren’t so different from Amelia’s. Sleep is a huge topic in our home these days. We are tired.

So tired.

So tired that a moment ago I just typed that Liz was a "onederful" friend.

Amelia, who was a champion sleeper between 9 and 15 weeks, started waking up 2-4 times a night again at around 15 weeks. If you google "4 month sleep regression" you get a zillion hits, so apparently this kind of sleep pattern in common in babies her age. It is still a terrible blow to my sanity. I am a sleeper. Generally I am a pretty happy, patient, and generous person, if I do say so myself, but I discovered in college that I become depressed and grouchy without consistent sleep. And that's putting it mildly.

Due to the sleep issue, it's been hard for me to really enjoy Amelia some days. It's just very hard to get up 2 or 3 or more times a night--it's not even that A stays awake--she eats and goes back to sleep right away 99% of the time--but it's that more often than not it takes ME a long time to go back to sleep. I start thinking and worrying and tossing and turning. (And sometimes I think Suki and Amelia are plotting against me. If Amelia goes back to sleep at 4:30, Suki will come in at 5:00 and scratch my desk or meow for breakfast.)

Naps have been another issue. Amelia’s naps have never been terrible regular but about two weeks ago she went on a nap strike. It was almost impossible for me to get her down. Even though she was very sleepy, rubbing her eyes, yawning and generally being a grouchpuss, she would not go to sleep. I had to nurse her, rock her, and nurse her some more. Once she fell asleep I had to carefully stand up and kind of dance around shushing and nursing even more. Then there was the s-l-o-w easing of her sleepy self into the crib—and as soon as I let go of her, more crying. I tried the pacifier, which sometimes worked, as well as trying to sort of lean over the crib and rock her while she was in it. More often than not these episodes ended not with Amelia napping but with BOTH of us in tears.

And—here’s the icing on the cake—when she did go to sleep, she woke up in 30-45 minutes. Which is NOT a long enough nap for her. So she was still fussy.

All of this is written in past tense because as of yesterday afternoon, we are in nap training. I have decided I can no longer handle these scenes. So when I think she is getting sleepy, we have a wind down time in a quiet room, then we go into Amelia’s room and read 2 or 3 stories, and then I hug her, tell her I love her, put her in her crib and leave the room.

She then cries.

So I wait.

And wait, as long as I can, or until I think she is getting too upset. Then I go in, hold her for a minute, tell her I love her, tell her she needs to sleep to be a happy baby, a baby that other people can stand to be around, and put her back down.

She cries again.

Yesterday afternoon, our practice ended in Amelia not taking a nap. She got herself into a second wind and I gave up. This morning, we had a bit more success: after the fifth or so time I went in, she fell asleep as I was comforting her and didn’t wake up when I put her down. She then slept for AN HOUR AND A HALF!!! (She also fell asleep both on the way to and coming home from the grocery store, more evidence that she is overtired.) And this afternoon, she got so upset that I decided to nurse her, she fell asleep, and again, didn’t wake up when I put her down. She is sleeping now.

So maybe that doesn’t sound all that different than before, because she still isn’t falling asleep in the crib on her own. But my mindset is different. As opposed to just desperately trying to get her to sleep in any way I can, I now have a plan that I think is a good one. She does need to learn to fall asleep on her own, and I think this nap practice might eventually facilitate that.

Letting her cry is hard. The other night, I was putting clean sheets on our bed, and I used these sheets that came from my grandmother’s house. Somehow they still smell like her house, a clean, Clorox and floral-laced scent, even after all this time. And I was thinking about how my grandmother and mother always made me feel so safe, and always took care of me, how they would never have just let me cry alone in my bed. And I thought, that’s why I can’t let her cry it out.

Still, yesterday I was talking to Meg (while Amelia cried, as a matter of fact), and I was telling her about the sheets, and she pointed out that my mother and grandmother also had to let me learn things on my own. Also that I don’t remember being five months old and that I probably did sometimes cry in my crib. So for now, we are not not crying, but we’re not exactly “crying it out.” I am not even sticking to any particular rules, such as a time limit on the crying or saying I will never nurse her to help her sleep. I am just trying to follow my intuition, striking a balance between helping her learn a skill that will make her a happier baby in the long run and not letting her become too hysterical at any given moment while she learns it.

And besides—or perhaps MOST importantly—if she doesn’t eventually sleep more, I will lose my mind. A sane mommy is a happy mommy.