Are You Sleeping? Continued...

Yes we are! We've been night weaning, and here's how things have been going:

CIO Night 2: Silence till 2:20. Yelling--not crying, just angry "Ba-ba-ba"'s for about an hour. Real crying for about 10 minutes. Dean went in to check. Initially, more angry crying, maybe 5 minutes worth, then silence. Slept till 6:15 or so with no night nursing.

CIO Night 3: Loud and sudden yell at 3:45. Silence. Babbling increasing to crying-ish sounds at 4:00. Waited a couple of minutes, nursed. Silence for 15 minutes, then quiet talking. Slept till 6:30 or later.

CIO Night 4: Less than one minute of crying at about 2:00. Crying at 4:30. Nursed, slept till 6:30.

CIO Night 5: No crying till 5:45. Nursed, slept till 7:00.

CIO Night 6: No crying till around 4:00. Nursed, slept till 6:45.

I forget what night we are on now, but the last couple of nights have looked a lot like night 6.

Yea!

I couple of things have really helped this time around. The main one is my true and firm commitment to not nursing Amelia between bedtime and 4am. Before I might have given in at 3:00 or 3:30 or 3:45, and the thought did cross my mind those first nights, but I stuck to my rule. It has really helped because nursing at 3:30 one night can lead to 3:00 the next, then 2:30, and suddenly it's 11:30 and you find yourself wrenched from your deep sleep and walking to the crib. I actually see now that we probably could have just gone with no night nursing at all--no milk till the morning--but the 4am limit helped me hang in there those first nights because I knew that at least we would get a few more hours of sleep in the early morning. I think I will go for total night weaning in a month or two, after we are (HOPEFULLY) more used to this new pattern, and I am able to bear the thought of losing those early morning hours of sleep for a few nights.

NOW... we are in the battle of the naps. I think Amelia might be switching from two naps to one. Notice how she did this just as I had gotten totally settled into the pattern of two naps. My days have gone nothing like that schedule I posted since the day I posted it. It has helped with the allotment of chores throughout the week, but that's it. She has been heartily resiting each and every nap. I am a bit at a loss about what to do. I think I am going to try moving her morning nap back later and later till I find a time at which she will go to sleep with less than 15 minutes of fussing and sleep for more than an hour. Preferably more than 2 hours if it's going to be her only nap. That's the ideal, anyway; we'll see what actually happens.

Camping With A, Part 3: Mount Elbert

I am still trying to catch up on documenting all of our summer fun.

After our first night of camping with Amelia, we headed for Mount Elbert, Colorado's tallest mountain.

This is a picture of Mt. Elbert from the car window.



I took it the afternoon after the Windsor Lake hike. I was more than a little intimidated.

But Dean assured me that even though Mount Elbert is obviously very tall, it is a relatively "easy" hike because it is also a fairly long, so you gain the elevation over a long distance. We weren't sure we could make it, but we decided to give it a try.

It started off well, flattish and woodsy. We did have to stop after about 20 minute to give Amelia some milk, but then she fell asleep. So we kept going up, up and away as she snoozed. Her sleep is a real motivating factor to keep going. We kept passing a man and his son and their dog, then they would pass us. As the trail got steeper and steeper, the man got more and more tired. His son kept leaving him behind and they would communicate on walkie-talkies. (Well, probably not walkie-talkies really--the 21st century version.) It made me feel better that someone else was having a hard time on the hike, although actually I felt pretty good, much better than the previous day.

After we passed the tree line, the trail got even steeper. You could see a summit in the distance. Dean said it was a false summit. I thought he was kidding. He wasn't.

Here are some shots from after we passed the tree line.





Finally, I got very so tired and hungry that we had to stop, even though Amelia was still asleep. She woke up and we had a little picnic.



Then we packed up and started off again, but we didn't get much farther. Amelia was complaining about being in her backpack and needed a longer break. And I was tired myself. We were still pretty far from even the false summit, so Amelia and I decided to play in the grass while Dean kept going for a little while.

He kept going for about 20 minutes, then passed some descending hikers who told him he was still pretty far from the top. Since the weather was looking a little questionable, with dark clouds in the distance, he decided to turn around.

Here are some pictures from he took while we waited.







Amelia had a fun time standing and playing with rocks and flowers.



In the meantime, the man and his son had passed by me and Amelia. The man, panting, sort of flung himself in the grass beside the trail, and the son kept going.

When Dean returned we went down, down, down. Amelia slept again for most of the descent, but woke up and got fussy toward the end. We were probably pushing the limit of how long we could realistically hike with a baby. We entertained her with songs, but we were all glad to get back to the car.

It was an ambitious hike, and we didn't make it to the summit. But I am gad we tried. We will not have another chance until Amelia is old enough to hike it herself, unless Dean and I go alone, because A will probably be too heavy to carry that far next year.

It was very beautiful. I do think I could have done made it to the top, too, which made me feel good.

Happy Birthday Sophie!

The Housewife

Lest you were been misled by an earlier post in which I was somewhat cheery about housework, let me state for the record that I am neither emotionally nor intellectually fulfilled by the life of the housewife. Yet lately I have found myself loading the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher, folding clothes, and sweeping up a curious mixture of shredded wheat shards, crushed Cheerios and cat hair all day long. Chores and the state of the house have been driving me crazy. It seems like no matter how much (laundry, sweeping, straightening up, etc) I do there is still more (laundry, sweeping, straightening up, etc) to be done. And it has started to eat away at time I would like to spend doing other things, when I am not playing with and caring for Amelia of course, such as writing, reading, posting here, and, perhaps most importantly, watching Teen Mom.

At the same time I really do like staying on top of what needs to be done around the house. Dean is more than willing to do his share and more but he already comes home to The Amelia Channel (all Amelia, all the time!) and it is more fun to hang out and relax during the evenings and on weekends than to catch up on weekly chores. Since I am home all the time anyway it seems like there has to be some way to find a balance between completing the tasks that need to be done and spending some of Amelia's nap time doing what I like, want and need to do to feel like my life is more than breastfeeding, housework, and singing "The Wheels on the Bus."

So, the other morning I began to imagine what the job of "housewife" and "stay at home mom" would look like if I had to go into an office to do it. I figure there would be more structure. Tasks organized into a sort of daily and weekly routine rather than a nebulous and perpetual blob.

So I made a list of everything I do: all the chores, errands, outings and fun things I usually do in an average week. Then I divided them up by how often they need to be done. There are daily chores like sweeping. There are every other day chores like doing a load of laundry or diapers. There are things that really only need to be done once a week, like going through all the mail and paying bills, and irritating administrative things like making appointments or trying to consolidate your various retirement accounts, a result of changing states and jobs several times, into a single IRA.

Next I drew up a little schedule:



I am hoping a loose structure is going to help me better use my time. As you can see my and Amelia's workday day is divided into 5 main segments: morning playtime, morning nap, midday playtime, afternoon nap, and post-nap. We go to the park in the mornings but I am happiest when the kitchen is clean, the beds are made, and I have showered before we go. Otherwise that stuff eats into A's morning nap, which as you can see I most like to use to write. Midday playtime is the best time to leave the house for errands like grocery shopping or for fun things like Book Babies or lunch with Dean, which we have decided to do once a week. (Sometimes I will join Amelia and Dean for lunch and sometimes I will leave them to their own devices for an hour while I go to the library, something I am very excited about.) We really spend most of Amelia's waking time playing or reading or the like but I am usually able to get a few things done while she pulls pots and pans out the of cabinets or turns the pages of board books on her own.

And, as a bonus, now readers of this blog can easily look up what I am doing at any given moment. Note that we are on Mountain Standard Time. :) As you can see, I am right on track: it is Thursday afternoon and I am writing on the blog. However, I am noticing that I forgot to add Teen Mom to my schedule. Pencil that in for right now.

Deja Vu...

So we are crying it out again. After consulting with several other breastfeeding mothers I decided that I had to make up my mind either to commit to night weaning or accept the fact that Amelia was going to wake up 1-3 times a night for however long and not worry about it anymore. Then Tuesday night, she woke up 3 times, at 11:30, 2:00 and 4:00. The anger I felt about being wrenched out of all my deep sleep plus the exhaustion and despair I felt on and off all day yesterday indicated to me that I need to commit to night weaning. Yesterday morning it was like I had had no break from Amelia at all and I did not feel like playing, talking, singing, or reading board books. Since those are important parts of my job, I decided:

no more milk between bedtime and 4 am.

I explained the new plan to Amelia yesterday evening as she went to sleep. She seemed game.

Last night she cried, on and off, for 20 minutes at 12:30, less than 5 minutes at 3:00, and then again 4:45, when I went to her. Oddly, she cried LOUDLY when I put her back down after the 4:45 feeding, but only for about 5 minutes. Then she slept (mostly--there was some faint babbling) till just after 7:00 am.

Whew.

It wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Of course I was wide awake between 12:30 and after 2:00.

I am hoping that after 3 nights she will be back into her previous pattern of sleeping most of the night... and then, one fine day, I will be able to sleep all night too.

Cousins

We got to meet Micah this weekend! It kind of looks like Amelia was caught in the act of interrogating him. But they were just discussing serious world events.

Are You Sleeping? Are You Sleeping?

because we are not.

Sigh.

I mean, it could be worse. I am very aware that it could be worse. Amelia does not wake up and stay awake. She is not waking up every hour, like another Book Baby we know, whose poor mother looks worse than I do. But. She. Is. Still. Waking. Up. Every. Night! At least twice, usually around 2 and 4 am. But last night it was 10:30 and 4.

Now. I know several people with brand new babies, and I am aware that to them it sounds super luxurious to have a baby who only wakes up twice. But Amelia is 11 months old and I am losing my ability to persevere. And my ability to even remember words like persevere.

It's not the waking up so much as the fact that I cannot go back to sleep after waking up--although it's getting very old being wrenched out of all my deep sleep cycles too. We had that stretch, that beautiful stretch, of Amelia sleeping till around 4 or 5, then going back to sleep till 6 or 6:30. I can do once. It's fine. But then 10:30 or (and sometimes AND) 2:00 AND 4 or 5 is getting me down.

I don't know why the stretch ended. What she was doing was crying out--VERY briefly--just a few wahs--and then going back to sleep. Since I knew she was in the pattern of going back to sleep, the wahs didn't really wake me up enough to stay awake. I think one night she didn't go right back to sleep, so I nursed her, and now we are back in the bad pattern.

I have read all the sleep books. I hate all the sleep books. Happy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child is like the baby sleep gestapo. At the other end of the spectrum we have The No-Cry Sleep Solution--seriously? I don't think it's possible to get a baby to sleep with NO crying. The Ferber idea of intermittent checking sounded good--except Amelia gets much angrier if you check on her and then exit her room than if you just leave her alone in there.

Last night we tried crying it out and she cried for 45 minutes, getting angrier and angrier. I am probably not committed enough to the crying it out for it to work. I don't know. I might really need to night wean, like A's pediatrician told me.

Do you have ideas? Will this magically get better when she turns one? I am trying to hang in there another month.

I am discouraged. I am losing hope. I am relying on frozen cookie dough to get by.