Photo Shoot

Thanks to our friends Jill & Jon, we had a family photo shoot yesterday! Jon dabbles in photography as a hobby and offered to take some pictures of us! Haley did great and was quite the baby supermodel! The pictures above are just a sampling and I should have the entire set of pictures later in the week.

I am glad to report that the whole house is sleeping better too! Friday & Sunday night Haley slept through the night (8:30-5:30) and Saturday night was up 2 times. On Friday she woke up with a rash on her chin which is another sign of teething. I'm just waiting on the first tooth! I also hung (by myself) some curtains in her room to make it a bit darker. Since the sun rises at like 4:30 am and doesn't set until like 10 pm I thought she may be confused with all the sun light. Anything for sleep.....

We otherwise had a great weekend her especially since the Penguins won the Stanley Cup! Go Pens! Pittsburgh has won 2 championships this year, but I'm afraid the Pirates are not anywhere close to having a chance.

Sleep Update

Last Wednesday evening we decided to start "sleep training" with Haley. It was time we got rid of our bad habit of getting Haley to fall asleep in our arms while walking around each time she was to nap or got to bed. As neither of us are comfortable with letting her cry it out but at the same time realizing we had to break the habit, I decided that The Baby Whisperer technique was a middle of the road "sleep training" technique. I had already read the book but invested in The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems which included LOTS of information on how to implement the techniques. Basically the technique entails putting the baby down awake in her crib (which we never did before) and patting her back (while she is on her side) and making a "shhh....shhh.....shhh" sound. When she cries, pick her up, pat her back and make the "shh..." but as soon as she is calm, put her back down and pat/shhh her. If she cries, pick her up and repeat. The first few days were rough taking sometimes up to an hour for her to go to sleep. I believe her cries were out of frustration as we were changing the way things were done. But I liked this technique as we were not leaving her alone to cry it out. (Thanks to my few friends who responded to my last sleep post for advice & encouragement on the subject.) I'm happy to say that now putting her down takes anywhere from 15 - 30 minutes sometimes with a decent amount of crying, sometimes (ok, occasionally) without really any.

But then last Sunday night she started waking up 5-6 times per night (again, see prior post). For the past several nights, our evening have following the same general schedule:

• 7:30 Bedtime feeding & diaper change
• 8:00 Few minutes of winding down (singing, books), then to bed
• 8:30 Typically sleeping
• 10:30 1st wake-up, crying/fussing, goes back to sleep with pat/shhhh
• 11:30 2nd wake-up, crying/fussing, goes back to sleep with pat/shhhh
• 2:00 3rd wake-up, crying/fussing, goes back to sleep with pat/shhhh
• 3:30 4th wake-up, crying/fussing, goes back to sleep with pat/shhhh
• 4:30/5:00 5th wake-up, crying/fussing, will not go back to sleep with pat/shhh, I assume she is hungry and feed her, back to sleep with pat/shhhh
• 7:00 Up for the day

I have tried everything I can think of. Tuesday was the last day she had any solids (she had been getting rice cereal for about 1.5 weeks). She was farting a lot so I thought that maybe her tummy was bothering her. Nope, still kept waking up. I gave her some baby Tylenol at 11:30 last night thinking that perhaps teething was waking her. Nope, still woke up.

I thought that maybe she was confused because it is bright outside now until 9:30pm and the sun finally sets around 10:30 or so. I may go buy some curtains this weekend to hang in her room in hopes that the darker it is the more she will sleep. I'm not really counting on this to work, but I'm desperate. I'm also a bit nervous about hanging curtains as the last time we tried to hang something other than a picture, it was a complete debacle and we now have a small whole in the wall.

Needless to say, both Steve & I are quite exhausted. Even though he has to work, he has gotten up 1 - 2 times per night as I just could not be awake the entire night for so many nights in a row. I do nap when she does, but it just is not enough. Yesterday I had an idea that I would sleep on the sofa, get up every time with her last, and Steve could get a full night sleep in our room. And since he has Friday off, Thursday night would be his turn to get up every time. I am really looking forward to getting more than 2 hours of continuous sleep. I am a person who really, really needs her sleep and I am about to loose my mind.....

So, if anyone has any suggestions, tips, etc. please share. And even if you are a friend of a friend and reading this blog, but do not know me, I don't care.

Snow, eh?

Ok, it is June 6th and it is snowing outside here in Calgary! Ahhhhhhhhhhh! The white on the roof in the picture is actually snow. And, no, I am not kidding!

Rice Cereal

Haley had her first rice cereal on Sunday. I had planned on giving it to her sometime within the next few weeks, but her lack of sleeping expedited the event. Her first encounter went pretty much as expected with her spitting most of it out (as seen in the video below.) But yesterday she was actually licking it out of the spoon and she ate all 2 teaspoons of cereal mixed with 4 teaspoons of breast milk. Tonight I think I'm going to make it a little less runny.

At her 4 month immunizations, the public health nurse (for those in the USA, the public health nurse, not pediatrician, gives the immunizations here in Canada) gave me a bit of a lecture about why I should wait until she was 6 months before introducing solids. I told her thank you for the information but that I was still planning on giving her cereal soon. I think these people have a script that they read from and are not allowed to deviate from.

P.S. She slept from 9 pm to 5:15 am last night! Yippee! Life is so much better when you sleep all night! (I hope I don't jinx tonight!)