She's changing

I have really noticed big changes in the baby this past week or two! She is starting to laugh more, for one. The last 3 nights she has slept through the entire night, knock on wood (I hope I didn’t just jinx that). We are talking she went to bed about 8:30pm and slept until 7:30am the next morning without wanting to be fed! The last two nights she really didn’t even fuss. We are finally past the whole pacifier thing, thank goodness. And that is because she has found her thumb. We had been leaving one arm out of her swaddle and she was able to suck her thumb and soothe herself back to sleep. Tonight we are trying no swaddle at all, and we shall see how it goes. The Swaddle Me is still handy in case we decide halfway through the night that we need to stick one arm in. She has been doing great with one arm free, so we shall see. Of course I still wake up about every 2 hours to check on her. But overall, she just really seems different to me the last two weeks, older I guess, but different. She seems to understand more, is trying to communicate more, and making different sounds. She has been practicing her MMMMMMMM sounds. She is so funny! Her new thing is making an Oo, Oo, Oo noise when she sees us making a bottle, like she is trying to say ‘oooo, I want it NOW!’ It makes me laugh every time!

Long ago I made insulated curtains for the basement. I thankfully had some of the insulator left over, and I made one large insulator curtain for the baby’s room. The insulator curtain has fabric, then a layer of a shiny plastic material, and then a layer of cotton. And then you put whatever fabric you want on the cotton side. Well, in the baby’s room, I just sewed a strip so I could put a curtain rod in and then we hung it behind the blinds. So, from the street, you see the cream colored fabric side. In her room, you don’t see anything because the blinds and curtains are closed. It does help a bit, the room got to 74 degrees the other day. And that was without her ceiling fan running. Once I turned that on, it went down to 73. That is much more acceptable than 77 degrees! Now that we have that figured out, I will try naps in there again.

I also bought oatmeal to try with her. She still does not like the rice cereal. She likes the oatmeal a little bit better. We tried it tonight for the first time, and not at bottle time, but on its own, about an hour after she drank a bottle. She ate a couple spoonfuls without really complaining! We may have success with this! Next we just need to adjust her schedule a bit to better accommodate when she wants to sleep. That is going to be a bit rougher. It might mean that I might have to start getting her up at 7am or earlier. She really prefers getting up at 7:30am or later. Not sure, I have to play with that one.

It looks like we are also going to be enrolling her in daycare this upcoming week. The girl who took over for my extended maternity leave has accepted a full time position elsewhere and they want me to come back. I have having a hard time with this one. The closer we get to the enroll day (Monday) the more I feel I am just not ready. But we did find a really great daycare. It’s the Child Development Center at Pikes Peak Community College. So, you have your ratio of 1 teacher for every 4 infants, but then you also have student teachers in with them a lot which drops the ratio down even more. And they are accredited by some big accreditation people, who I forget now, but it’s rare to have. And the prices are GREAT! So, who knows…?

Well she is asleep, which means I should be also! Hope everyone is well!