For the past three weeks or so, our daughter has been sleeping through the night like a champ, so I thought I should share my sleep solution. She is 14 months old, and previously had been waking up every three hours or so since birth. Even when she stopped breastfeeding at 7 months, she still wanted her bottle in the middle of the night, and it was always hunger. We were also cosleeping, and started putting her in her own room at 13 months.
Nothing is more important to young parents than the validation they get from parenting books telling them they're doing the right thing. While some of our friends of successfully "Ferber-ized" their kids, by letting them cry for progressively longer periods of time, our status as "tofu-hating hippies" (THH) meant that stories of babies crying until they vomited meant we'd never be able to handle it. Kate has the uncanny ability to scream herself blotchy in about 40 seconds, I'm pretty sure we're afraid she'd grow tentacles if we let her scream for more than a minutes. (more...)
We first came across the Chicco Hippo High Chair in a local store when Kate was still in utero and thought "Hey, a high chair that doesn't take up all of the room in our dining room!" Now that we've sacrificed most of our floor space (and toes) to a Fisher Price Jumperoo and convertible swing / high chair, we were pretty eager to find something to help us eat together as a family, without having an armed fort of plastic and metal shimmying up to the table. (more...)
The hardest thing about becoming a parent, as you probably know or have heard, is the sleeplessness. Before Kate was born in August we had heard the stories and the advice, like "sleep when the baby sleeps," but we really couldn't fathom what it actually was like.
You may have noticed new parents you know acquiring grey hair all of a sudden. I'm convinced it's not because of the stress, it's simply that you're awake more than twice as long and living two lifespans.
There are large chunks of time between bedtime and time-to-get-up that, if you really have support of a loved one, you can stay awake, praying for just five minutes of REM sleep. I know we went for at least a month each without a dream, and it really is unbelievable. Probably a lot like being in a foxhole, one eye always open, noise cutting through the peace and quiet just when it's your turn to go off duty.
While I'm sure we didn't do it "right", we have collected a few tips on how to maximize sleep, at least for my poor suffering wife, who needed it much more than I (the non-lactating one) did.
My husband and I have come up with a list of the five reasons Kate fusses. Whenever she fusses, something on this list is usually wrong:
It is a rare occassion that something on this list doesn't do the trick. We put this list together within the first couple of weeks when she came home, and other than adding "reflux" and "overstimulated", it's stayed the same. While we might forget what's on the list, she never does, and when we finally run through all five, it's inevitably done the trick.