10 Months

My bitty Bean is 10 months old!

What a month for the Bean. I feel like she has developed so much in the last few weeks, especially in becoming mobile. She still isn’t crawling, but that doesn’t stop her at all. She gets around! I have to be careful where I leave her because she could get into trouble. She is standing, not quite on her own unsupported, but very close. She knows how to take steps with help and she is starting to pull up on things. (Just while I was writing this, she stood up on her own on the side of a foot stool) Climbing out of the tub seems to be her favorite project right now.

Aside from getting going, she is chattering up a storm. No actual words yet, though we get “dada,” “mama,” and “baba” parroted back at us over and over and over when she feels like it. We sometimes get what we think are “hey/hi” and “wow/woah/oh”. She also hums, shouts, screams, and shrills like a bird at all times. She even whispers “dadoo” whenever you pick her up. As pleasant a baby as she is, she is definitely not shy about telling you when she is unhappy, be it vocally or physically. If she is done drinking her bottle, she will shove it out of her face. If she is done with the attention, she will shove you out of her face. We went through a screaming phase not too long ago, but it seems to have ended now thank goodness…or maybe I should say, it has ended for the time being.

Eating and sleeping have been about the same. We are still trying to get her to hold her own bottle, especially since she’ll be with Papi during the day soon and it would definitely be easier on him if she could drink her own bottle. We’re getting there. Mostly if I hand the bottle to her she wants to investigate it, turn it upside down, shake it, play with the nipple…she definitely knows how it works but for whatever reason just won’t take the final step of lifting it up. We had some success with a bottle that had handles on the bottom, but nothing concrete yet. She still gobbles up just about everything I give her for meals. Her favorites right now are ravioli, mandarin oranges, blueberries, and graham crackers. Oh, and she has four teeth now!

So, in lieu of another detailed monthly update, I thought I’d do a Day in the Life of A Bean…with approximated times, of course. A girl hates to be predictable.

6:30-7:30ish – wake up. Diaper change, breakfast, playtime, bottle
8:30-9:30ish – nap (mom’s time for an uninterrupted cup of coffee, breakfast, laundry, straighten up, etc)
11ish – wake up. diaper change, get dressed. If we have errands to run this is when I do them. If not, we watch a nature show or go for a walk, go to the park, etc
12:00-1:00ish – Lunch. More playtime/tv
2:00-3:00ish – another bottle, then nap.
4:00-5:00ish – wake up. Dinner.
6:00-6:30ish – evening walk
7:00-8:00 playtime, or sitting outside if the weather is nice, generally just family time
8:00 – bath time
8:30 – get out of the bath, quiet time in her room, bedtime routine. Lotion, pajamas, quiet music, last bottle
9:00 (hopefully) bed time

It’s hard to believe I am within two months of celebrating my little girl’s first birthday! I am thinking owl theme, she seems to love owls. Think that also might be her Halloween costume too. In the meantime, every day I am watching this bright girl learn more , test her boundaries (and mine) and become a little person. It’s so exciting!

9 Months

The Bean is 9 months old! Well…9 and a half at this point, but you get the idea.

At her checkup last week, she weighed 16lbs15oz and measured 28 1/4 inches long. Growing growing growing! The doctor was very pleased with her weight gain even though I was a little freaked out at first (I thought closer to 18lbs surely), but though she be but little, she is progressing through the percentiles normally. So she’s in the 24th percentile for weight and the 66th for height, so it may just be that she will be petite and tall. 

As of last night, she had taken one “step” as a crawler. She can get herself into the position and turn herself in circles, but she hasn’t quite been brave enough to take a leg forward. So is really close though, and gets very frustrated when she can’t do it, which makes me feel bad, but I don’t think it will be too much longer. However, she loves to stand behind her walker which we converted to a walk-behind. She isn’t taking any steps on her own just yet but she has exceptional balance and can stand there holding onto the bar for some time. I think she will be walking by her birthday. I really need to baby-proof stat.

Sleep is going okay, we had a slight setback with her nighttime sleep due to her top teeth coming in plus all the traveling we’ve been doing in the last few weeks. Things have been a little topsy turvy for a bit so hopefully she will settle in soon and the teeth will stop bothering her. She still naps like a champ though, usually twice a day for about 2-2 1/2 hours. 

Bean eats everything in sight. She has 3 8-oz bottles a day and then breakfast, lunch and dinner. For breakfast she usually has fruit (blueberries and oranges are her favorite), Cheerios, and a waffle or an egg depending on how lazy I am. For lunch she typically eats some cheese cubes, crunchy puffs (the veggie dip flavor is her favorite), some more fruit and maybe a veggie. For dinner, if she doesn’t eat what we are eating, she loves to have things like ravioli which she snarfs like there’s no tomorrow. I also try to give her those fruit and veggie pouches, which are convenient but a lot of times she wants to eat things on her own and not let me feed her. Usually if I put her food in front of her and leave her alone, she will clear (most of) her plate. She’s not a picky eater as of yet and will pretty much eat everything I give her. She still won’t hold her own bottle, but we’re working on it. Mama needs her hands back.

She loves to swim at the pool! We put her in her little floatie and she kicks and splashes like crazy. She also loves remotes and wind-up toys. We take evening walks and she waves at everyone we pass. She loves to sit in the castle tent we got her at IKEA and play with her toys. I realized while we were in Maine that while she is sociable and likes spending time around people, she definitely gets to a point when she wants to go and do her own thing and be quiet. She doesn’t like to have a lot of people smothering her and still doesn’t want to cuddle much. Some of the best time during the day is her “quiet time” after her bath, when I let her sit on the floor in her room and just play. She has magnetic letters that she loves, and she is a pro at the roller-coaster bead toy. She is extremely interested in small details. She’ll spend twenty minutes in her bath investigating the hole in the bottom of a rubber ducky or turning the wheels on the bottom of her wind-up airplane. She’s still incredibly observant and loves to sit outside in the grass and just watch the other kids. She isn’t very interested in other babies it seems like; if we sit outside with our neighbor’s 13-month old, she is more interested in the older kids than him. It is plain fascinating to watch her investigate something new. Ripping up my junk mail or magazines seems to be one of the best ways to entertain her for ten minutes. 

Here are some other pictures of the 9th month!

“Give me the baba and nobody gets hurt”

Round Two

Bean is in the thick of her second set of teeth coming in, these being to two buck teeth up top. (Those being the scientific names of course.) She went through the cranky-all-the-time phase while we were in Maine. The last few days she has been in the scream-at-random-moments phase and last night we were in the up-every-two-hours-screaming phase.

I mean, just look at this grumpasaurus rex.


Luckily, yesterday afternoon I saw the top left tooth cutting the gum so hopefully he worst is over for that tooth. Still, she was up a good portion of the night last night unable to rest, and today her morning nap was almost 2 1/2 hours long. Poor Bean.

Some Random…Ramblings

— Bean has been, fairly reliably, sleeping through the night for the better part of a month now, not including our trip to Maine. This means I’ve been getting away from my 8-month long mind fuck that said I had to go to bed as soon as she did because she was likely to be up a couple times during the night and I would need to get as much sleep as I could. Now that this has ended, I’ve thought about what a good opportunity it is to spend an hour or two working on the book (oh yeah, remember that?) before I come to bed. Have I done that yet? Noooooo….

— Speaking of Bean, she had her 9 month birthday when we were in Maine but we won’t have her checkup till next Monday. So I’ll update her new stats and what she’s been up to next week.

— My phone takes lousy panoramic pictures.

— I would like to take this opportunity to formally apologize to IKEA. When it first came to Denver and those massive blue walls went up and everyone essentially lost their minds over affordable Swedish furniture, I scoffed at the fad. Silly, I thought. Theeeen I moved back to Denver about 15 minutes away from those massive blue walls and basically I’m there every other weekend now. I would literally replace every piece of furniture and accessory in my house with IKEA stuff if I had the money. So, sorry IKEA. However, you still haven’t won me over with your meatballs.

— I read today that the Pumpkin Spice Latte launches on the 25th. I don’t have an in on Starbucks happenings anymore since Cameron left the company (I literally haven’t bought coffee in almost 5 years what am I going to DO) but it seems a little early to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as obsessed with pumpkin things as the next person, but everything in its due time. Summer is for lemon and caramel. Fall is for pumpkin. Okay and also caramel.

— Speaking of fall I had a moment of squee not too long ago when I realized we’d be able to take Bean to her first pumpkin patch soon! They also had costumes out at Costco today and I nearly died. SO EXCITED.

— Bean met a stuffed moose today. She was not impressed.

— I have been learning this summer, perhaps more than ever, that life is hard sometimes. Really hard. Sometimes life sucks and will hand you more than you think you can handle but somehow, the time passes, the sun goes down, and it comes up again the next morning just like it did the day before and will the day after that too. And sometimes it will rain, and thunder, and lightning will light up the sky and it will be scary for a while…but the storm always passes. It always does. And if you’re lucky, you get to see a rainbow when the clouds have lifted. And if you’re really lucky, it will look like this:

Happenings Around the Bean Pod

Happy Summer!

Well, what have we been up to lately? Seems like a lot! I feel like more often than not the last week or so we have been out of the house more than we’ve been in it!

Family Time

Last weekend my brother got married, so we had some out of town family in for that. We got to spend some time with my grandma Linda and grandpa John, who saw Bean when she was about a day old.

We took another trip to the aquarium with them, since it was too hot to spend time outside. Bean loved it.

Before the wedding rehearsal luncheon.

At the wedding (it was a renaissance theme)

Baby’s first baseball game

A New Beanmobile

The day we went to the aquarium I found myself crawling over the front passenger seat of my car to wrestle the stroller into the back seat because someone had parked too closely to me in the parking lot and the trunk had the baby’s wagon in it, and I decided then and there that it was time to get a bigger car. (I drive a Honda Accord.) I thought initially that we would trade in my car for something larger, since it still has a lot of value in it and that way we’d still only have one car payment, but when we mentioned this to Cameron’s dad and stepmom, they graciously offered to front us some cash to buy a car outright, then sell Cameron’s car so he would drive the Honda and I would drive the new car. We spent the weekend poking around on Craigslist and looking up car reviews. Finally, frustrated with the fact that nobody online seemed to be willing to respond in a timely manner to my inquiries about buying their cars, I popped onto a used dealership that has locations all over the place and immediately spotted a 2009 Dodge Caliber for an insanely good price considering it only had 63,000 miles on it. We jumped in the car and headed down to Park Meadows to look at it. It’s in practically perfect condition and we really liked it so we signed it that afternoon.

Here’s the catch though…it’s a standard. And can you guess who doesn’t know how to drive a standard? If you guessed ME, you’d be right. So, so far I’ve only driven my new car a couple of times under supervision while Cameron teaches me how to drive it. I think it’s going pretty well all things considered! I may even brave a trip to the store this afternoon. (In hindsight, that’s the reason it was so cheap. But I’m happy we got a good deal on it even if it is a manual.)

Renaissance Festival

‘Tis the season for ren faire! We’ve taken Bean to the festival twice now and she has a ball. I dressed up her wagon to look like a carriage and she is without a doubt the cutest thing that has ever happened to the faire. Nobody even notices me and my parents in our (cough) thousands of dollars worth of garb because everyone is staring at the baby. I guess that’s okay though.

This was right at the end of the day before we left–she was TIRED.

Keeping Cool

The temps lately have been in the high 80s and low 90s which is a bit brutal, so I try to avoid taking the baby outside in the middle of the day if I can help it. We go for our walks either early in the morning or in the evening when it is cooler. In between, we steal free air conditioning at the mall or hang out in the basement and watch tv. I say “watch tv” loosely, because we don’t have cable so really we’re watching dvds or Netflix. And when I say watching dvds or Netflix I mean Disney movies or documentaries. I know screen time is supposed to be discouraged at this age, but I honestly have no problem whatsoever with Disney or documentaries. I’m not plopping her down in front of the tv alone so I can go do something else, we always watch together, and I’m comfortable with her watching these programs rather than cartoons.

Plus, this way I get to learn stuff too. This week we have been watching “Blue Planet” which is about the oceans. I may have a future marine biologist on my hands.

Sleep

Maybe it’s because we’ve been keeping busy and have been out and about so frequently, maybe it’s because she’s not teething right now, or maybe it’s because she’s just figuring it out finally, but sleep has been great lately. She’s had 3 nights in the last week where she slept straight through the night! If she doesn’t sleep all the way through, she only gets up once, has a small bottle, and falls right back to sleep. It’s been awesome.

 

 

7 Months

Well, I normally use that chalkboard to write what month we are at as well as the date…but the Bean had other plans for it this month. As soon as I set it down in front of her she grabbed it and rubbed all the writing off. Oh well!

We had a lot going on this month with the Bean! She now sits up on her own, eats basically everything I give her, started chewing real food, has 2 teeth now, and has started saying consistent sounds that seem to be actual concerted efforts at words. We’ve even heard what we think might have been attempts at “hi,” “kitty” (though it came out “tikky”), and maybe, possibly, even “daddy.”

I’m happy to say that the un-swaddling effort seems to be going without much of a hitch. When she’s not teething, she sleeps pretty solidly even for nap times. When she is teething, well, that’s a completely different story, but I guess that’s just part of the package.

I try to give her 2 “meals” a day now, as well as snackies in between bottles. I’m not full-on baby-led weaning (I don’t think) but if I see something on our plates that I think she could handle, I give it to her. Tater tots, beans, small bites of frozen yogurt…she eats pretty much anything and everything. This morning she tried orange juice for the first time and she didn’t even bat an eye at the taste. She loves the yogurt bite treats and apple-sweet potato crunchies from Gerber Graduates. In the mornings I try to give her pieces of fruit, strawberries or blueberries, along with some yogurt, and she snarfs it all. She even likes hummus! I’m so thrilled that I appear to have a baby who enjoys food. She still drinks 4 bottles a day plus usually one overnight, but I’ve noticed that with the addition of the solids she doesn’t appear to be as hungry for as much formula as she used to, which is good because that makes it last a little longer. She can sort of feed herself, but usually I put it in her mouth for her just to keep the mess to a minimum. She is still working on the pincer grip but usually she grabs the food with her fist and then tries to shove her fist in her mouth. So, still a work in progress obviously. We are still working on getting her to hold her own bottle too. (Yesterday we left one of her bottles with handles at a restaurant and I’m super annoyed.) She gets the idea but the application isn’t quite there yet.

If you read my last post you recall that I was fighting with her teeth. She popped one a few days after Mother’s Day and I didn’t even notice. Seriously. I happened to peek in her mouth and there it was. The one right next to it was a completely different story, oh lord. That thing sat right under the skin of her gum for weeks. It finally popped about a week ago, or I’m assuming that’s when it happened anyway because the poor thing was up all night screaming her head off. The next day was totally different and the tooth was out. Yay! My mom estimates that the top center teeth are about 2-3 weeks away. Guess I’ll enjoy the tooth-free time while I can.

She loves getting out of the house and hanging out with us. I take her to the park almost daily (though it depends on her nap schedule, if she gets up too late I don’t take her out because it’s just too hot). She can sit in the front part of a shopping cart now which makes my life massively easier in terms of shopping. We’ve gone to the mall, the art museum, a chalk art festival in downtown, a Memorial Day service at the local cemetery, pretty much everywhere we go she is down. She loves hanging in her stroller and is good in the car…usually. Next weekend the Colorado Renaissance Festival opens, and I’m in the process of hunting down a used wagon for her so that I can transform it into a carriage and trundle her around the faire site. (It’s too uphill and bumpy for the stroller and I’m not carrying her all day.)  At least she is ready for the faire!

She loves her kitties. The best way I’ve found to entertain her recently is put two piles of catnip in front of her. The cats come running and she laughs and laughs at them. Sure, the cats are stoned all day long, but it gives me a few minutes to get a couple things done while she is entertained. On that note, she really is pretty independent and definitely doesn’t require my attention all the time, which I’m grateful for. Now that she can sit up, I can put her on the floor or in her playpen with her toys all around her and she will entertain herself for a while. In her bath, as long as she has her wind-up toys, she will stay quiet for twenty minutes while she tries to figure it out. She is curious and loves to explore and observe. She is obviously a hands-on learner and loves new textures and sounds. Anything that rattles or crinkles has her full attention, so tins with snacks in them and pieces of paper are super handy. She sits in the grass feeling it with her toes which is super adorable. I’m going to be making up some sensory play toys soon because she really likes feeling different things. She loves music too, and she bangs away all day on her little piano and her guitar.

She isn’t too interested in trying to crawl yet, and still usually gets pretty annoyed when I put her on her belly if it isn’t to sleep. On the one hand I’m okay with this because I have a lot of baby proofing to do when it finally happens and I haven’t figured that out yet, but on the other hand I start worrying she’s falling behind when in 1 outing 3 strangers in a store ask me if she’s crawling yet. I know every baby is different and some don’t crawl at all, it’s just one of those paranoid mommy things I guess.

One thing everybody does comment on, however, is how happy she is. And it’s true! I have one happy baby. She smiles and laughs at just about everything now and generally is just one easy-going gal. I feel like if she were an adult, she’d be that friend of yours who is down for anything at anytime because really, she’s just happy to be here.

Joining the Ranks of the Unswaddled

….why yes, that is an attempt at a lame Game of Thrones pun. You know, in case you were wondering.

So, we decided that the time had finally come to get the Bean to sleep without her blanket. Since birth she has been one of those babies who really prefers to be wrapped up tight to sleep. Since she has also been a belly sleeper since about 10 weeks or so, I knew it wasn’t safe to put her in her velcro swaddle, so we’ve been wrapping her in an afghan, which I figured was a safe compromise. She could still be on her belly to sleep, was feeling tight and secure, but still had enough wiggle room to remove and arm and roll over, and if she did, there were enough holes in the blanket that it wouldn’t suffocate her. This worked for a long time…until it didn’t.

All things considered I should have started this process a while ago. For the last month or so she has been rolling over and getting out of the blanket numerous times a night, causing her to wake and cry until I came in and wrapped her back up. In the last few weeks she has been putting up more of a fight than normal in getting into her blankie at night, and that, coupled with an uncannily-timed newsletter from The Incredible Infant about the dangers of wrapping once baby can roll over, told me it was time.

She was more ready for it than I was, to tell the truth. I got comfortable in our routine and I knew that pretty much no matter what, that blanket would put her to sleep. So I kept putting it off, because I was worried about the transition. Usually about once a month we attempted to put her to sleep in a wearable blanket instead of a wrapped one, and she would just lie there propped up on her arms looking around and rolling over instead of sleeping. Or her arm movements would wake her. So maybe those early attempts were just too early. But the other night, she started thrashing and screaming when I tried to put her in her blanket before bed, so I thought, all right, tonight’s the night. I fed her her last bottle and laid her in her crib without a blanket. She fussed for a couple of minutes, but after one or two binkie replacements, she went to sleep. She woke once at 1:30, I put her binkie back in, and the next thing I knew it was 6:30. It was the most solid night she had slept in a really long time. Last night, she conked out and didn’t make a peep until 4:30. I had decided that I would start letting her wean herself off the night bottle, at the recommendation of her pediatrician. If she really wants one, she can have it, but if she goes back to sleep on her own, let her go without. So she needed one last night, but after that she went back to sleep until 7:30.

Naps have still been a little wobbly on our new plan, mostly I think because at night she is sufficiently exhausted and pretty much falls asleep right away, whereas during nap time she is tired but not really tired, and it takes a little longer to coax her into falling asleep. But, I’m happy to say she has been soothing herself to sleep for the most part and we haven’t even had to let her cry for much longer than a minute or two. So, not to jinx myself, but I feel like it’s going pretty well.

Speaking of naps, I don’t know why this excited me but yesterday we went to Thorntonfest with my parents, which is a community festival in my hometown with people selling crafts and artisans and local businesses selling stuff, it’s a fun time. (That’s not really the part that excited me, by the way.) I had never taken the Bean to anything like that before and I wasn’t sure how she would take to being out and about for several hours outside with lots of noise, but when she started to fuss a bit we reclined her stroller seat and she passed out for a good 45 minutes while we walked around. (That’s the part that excited me. You can tell my life is really thrilling because I get excited about naps.)

After that she was content to kick back and let us stroll her around like she owned the place. What a kid I have.

6 Months

A half a year old!

But…since I forgot to do her 5 month update, here’s that picture too.

What a happy, spirited girl I have. She has really blossomed in the last month or so and she smiles at everything and everyone. You still have to work at her to get a real laugh out of her (I am the same way though) but she is very jovial.

I haven’t taken her to her 6 month appointment yet (we have to find a new pediatrician) so I don’t have exact stats on her, but when I took her to the doctor for a cold about a month ago she was 13 pounds exactly. She’s been putting on about a pound a month consistently up till now but she seems to finally be getting some solid chunk on so she might be more than 14 pounds now. She is actually fitting into 6 month clothes; she was wearing 3 month sizes up to really recently. I can’t really dress her in footie pajamas for very long anymore because her feet grow out of them faster than the rest of it! Her hair is coming in really long and got really dark! Looks like it will be brown after all. Her eyes are still beautiful gray.

She loooooves food! We are still mostly on purees, but she gobbles them up at light speed. Carrots, peaches, pears, sweet potatoes, she loves them! The only thing she hasn’t really been crazy about was prunes, but really, who is. This last week I started giving her puffs and she is still getting used to those. She eats them and I think she likes the flavor, but the texture obviously freaks her out. We’ll work on it. I tried strawberries in the mesh feeder a couple days ago, and she got the hang of it really quickly but the strawberries were obviously way too tart because she freaked out! She even got a bite of my frozen yogurt and she loved it so much she tried to grab the whole cup.

Speaking of eating, she popped her first two teeth a couple of days ago! I was sure that her top two would come in first but she proved me wrong and the bottoms came in. I never even noticed because she wasn’t especially cranky or anything like that, but the other day she was nomming on her Sophie and I happened to look in her mouth and saw two gray things in there, and there they were! She has been wearing an amber teething necklace, so I have no idea if that’s why she hasn’t been showing any additional crankiness over it all, but if so, yay. They haven’t quite come up all the way yet but they are on the way for sure.

Sleep has been okay, but a little bumpier than normal. She was sick about a month ago, and then we moved and she went through a huge growth spurt at the same time, so we went through a hitch where she felt the need to wake every 3 hours at night and put up a fight going back down and then wake for the day at 4:30am. We’re slowly getting out of that now, but man oh man was it nice when she would sleep 6 hours at a time and only wake for a bottle once! (Which she did at my parent’s house last week, I should note. Grumble.) Naps are still pretty normal, once we got out of the moving transition period she went right back to sleeping about 2-2 1/2 hours for each nap.

She still isn’t sitting up on her own and she hasn’t rolled over from her back to her belly yet, and she isn’t very interested in attempting to crawl, but she can stand up! Not independently and she can’t pull herself up, but if I stand her and lean her against something she can support herself. Doing things in the “correct” order would be boring I guess.

My parents bought her a walker a couple weeks ago and it’s like the best thing ever for her. She loves that thing! Especially since it has a tray that I can put her favorite guitar on and make music. She can go pretty much everywhere that we go around the house and be present with us instead of in her play pen which I think she likes much better.

Even though she can’t sit up or roll yet, she still gets around. Those legs of her are strong. She kicks the bars of her crib and the edge of her changing table so hard she gets bruises on her feet! When she lays on her back on the floor she can wiggle herself all over the place and usually when I come into her room after a nap she is completely perpendicular and upside down from the position I originally put her in. Once she figures out how to crawl and walk she is going to be friggen unstoppable.

Her favorites right now are bath time, playing guitar, sitting on the back patio in her new chair, swinging at the playground, and going for walks. She has to bring Sophie with her everywhere we go. She is an observer for sure; she loves watching the other kids at the park and she is happy to sit and watch the geese in the pond in the courtyard. Being in the city opens up so many possibilities for us and she has been out and about with me a lot. We’ve been to IKEA and the aquarium and the book store and I think this weekend we’ll go to the Botanic Gardens. She usually enjoys being in the Ergo, but I think I might have to figure out the back carry soon because it’s pretty obvious she much prefers to be facing outward and looking at things than having to stare at mommy’s neck. She loves her kitties! They seem to have welcomed her into the pack too, especially Sherlock. She smiles and laughs at them and they love to cuddle up next to her on the couch. Whiskey even sleeps on her changing table. Weirdly, when she was at my parent’s house last week, she cried every time their cat Simon meowed at her. For a while she was really interested in Brody and would laugh at him all the time, but since he is living with my parents right now I think she has forgotten about him, because last time she saw him she cried at him too. Oh, and she totally has a crush on Jimmy Fallon. Usually in the mornings I turn on last night’s Tonight Show and she will stop whatever she is playing with and stare.

I Love Sleep. Sleepy, sleep, sleep.

“Let her sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” 

– Napoleon Bonaparte

I should preface this post with the fact that I have never actually seen Anchorman a disclaimer to appease the Mommy Wars combatants out there. I’m not using this post to brag, criticize, or diagnose. I’m not saying anything I’m doing here is better than anything anyone else is doing. I’m not claiming to be an expert at infant sleep or anything like that, but since we have a 4-month old who has slept pretty much through the night for a long time, I figure we must be doing something right. I’m just putting forth a list of things that work for us in the event that someone out there is frantically googling for help. Maybe something here will help. Maybe not. Whatever. Take what you need, leave what you don’t. If you don’t agree, feel free to keep on moving.

Despite the awful first few months we went through with the Bean, I have to admit that she has always been a relatively decent sleeper. It was more difficult at first, obviously, but since she was about 8 weeks old we settled into a pattern and since then (knock on wood) she has been a rock star sleeper.

I think what has made it work for us is 2 major things: routine, and her disposition. Not all babies like to sleep, plain as that. The Bean does! She is like her mommy like that. If I peek into her room during her nap before she is done sleeping, she will actually give me a look, turn her head away from me, and continue snoozing. Fine by me.

So here’s some things that work for us in the sleep department. Like I said, I’m not looking to be contested or criticized, nor do I want people to think I’m bragging or saying that what I’m doing is better than anyone else. What works for one family doesn’t for another.

1. White noise machine. We have a little sound machine that I got at Walmart for like 15 bucks and it is awesome. It runs on batteries or A/C and has 6 different sounds. You can time it out to turn off after a certain amount of time, but I pretty much leave it on all the time.

2. Humidifier. Not sure if this contributes at all to the sleep, but I figured I’d mention it since we use it every night. It is SO dry up here, and I notice that if we don’t use it, she ends up boogery and congested the next morning. (So do we!) We have one that projects stars onto the ceiling which is an awesome night light, and it has a slot for Vick’s menthol…thingies? in the back so that if she is ever sick or congested, I can just pop one of those things in there and it will fill the room with Vick’s vapor. I think this cost me $30 or so but it has been a great investment.

3. Wrapping her. At first, she had to be swaddled to sleep. She is definitely one of those babies who prefers to be tucked in tightly. I am the same way though–I love climbing into bed and cocooning myself! Now that she is a bit bigger, I wrap her in an afghan tight enough that she feels secure, but loose enough that she can get her arms free if she needs. I have tried putting her in a sleep sack/wearable blanket, but the startle reflex is still in effect and she tends to wake herself up too much with those, so once that fades, I’ll start putting her back in that.

4. Naps! I am a true believer in that whole “sleep begets sleep” theory. Caroline naps usually 3 times a day, but sometimes she makes it 2 long ones. The trick, I think, is knowing her signs and schedule. Right now, she can only go about 2 hours in between naps, so usually at the first sign of tiredness, I put her down. I don’t wait until she is really tired. I also have dark curtains in her room so that her room is sufficiently dark during the day.

5. Binkie/Pacifier/Soother/Whatever you call it. Binkies tend to be one of those divisive yes or no items in the battles of the Mommy Wars, but we use them. She isn’t addicted to her binkie, in fact she usually only wants/needs it in two places: in bed, and in the car. When I put her down for sleep, I pop a binkie in, and she goes right to sleep. Sometimes she wakes up in the middle of the night wanting it back, but that is actually getting less and less often now. I think if I just started not giving it to her, she’d be fine, but I figure for now it’s working, and if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

6. Routine. This one is big, I think. Babies like routines. Late in the afternoon, she will usually go down for one last short nap around 5:00 or so, and even if she is still sleeping at say, 7, I will get her up and start our bedtime routine. I have a feeling if I left her to sleep, she’d be fine, but she’d probably be awake for the day way earlier than I’d like. Our bedtime routine generally consists of a warm bath, low lights in the bedroom, getting into her jammies, lavender lotion, sometimes a story, and finally I turn out the lights and sit in her rocker in the dark and give her her last bottle. Once she is done with that (or sufficiently sleepy and not eating any more) I burp her, wrap her in her blanket, give her a kiss and put her in bed. Pop a binkie in, turn on her sound machine, and walk away and close the door. I check on her once before we go to bed, but other than that, I don’t bother her.

7. Limited interaction during the middle of the night. Right now, she is usually waking once a night to eat. When I hear her fussing on the monitor, I get up, make her bottle (I bring the formula and a clean bottle into the master bathroom before we go to bed since our kitchen is downstairs and it’s just that much faster), pick her up out of bed, change her (if I don’t she is usually soaked through her jammies by morning and I’d rather let her continue to sleep comfortably for as long as possible), and give her her bottle. Then burp, a kiss, back in her blankie, and back to bed with her binkie. I don’t turn on the lights, don’t talk to her very much, and keep things very quiet and calm.

8. Bedtime/Naptime in the crib. For the most part, Caroline has only ever slept in one place: in her crib. Obviously at first she napped frequently in her chair or in her wrap, and she sleeps in the pack and play when we visit her grandparents, but 99% of her nights have been spent in her crib. I’m not comfortable with co-sleeping and have only ever done it a few times when we were really desperate for sleep. Caroline knows that her crib is her safe place and that is where she goes to sleep. Even on night #1 home from the hospital, she slept in her crib in her room. Now–I should point out that we are lucky enough to have an extra bed in her room, and we slept in her room with her for about 8 weeks. I understand this isn’t a possibility for most people and you want to be close to the baby those first few weeks, which is 100% understandable.

9. She sleeps on her tummy. I know, I know. Big supposed no-no. But raise your hand if you were brought up in that generation when tummy sleep was not only the norm but it was recommended. The recommendations regarding SIDS change so often because nobody really knows exactly what causes it. I didn’t sleep her on her belly when she was a newborn, obviously. I waited till she was big enough and strong enough to lift her head, turn it, and support herself on her elbows. She just doesn’t like to sleep on her back. I started it out with naps, so that I could check on her frequently. Finally, I just started doing it for night time too, and she sleeps great. I think you have to feel 100% comfortable with this, though.

10. We let her cry. Yep, another battle cry for the Mommy Wars. If you haven’t already guessed, I’m not big into the whole gentle/attachment parenting thing. Just not my style. If I’ve just put her back to bed after her midnight bottle and I know that she is dry, full, and has burped, but she’s crying or fussing, I’m going to give her a little time to work it out on her own because I know she’s going to go back to sleep. (If anything, I will pop her binkie back in.) I never, ever rush into her room upon the first peep that she makes. When she is napping during the day, if she’s only been down for 45 minutes and I know she could go longer, I will give her a few minutes and if she doesn’t go back down, I’ll sneak into her room and put her binkie back into her mouth and usually that will do the trick. Obviously there are limits to this, I’m not going to let her scream for 45 minutes, and I wouldn’t do this with a newborn, but you get the idea. I know she knows how to put herself back to sleep and I think that’s super important with establishing good sleep habits.

So there you have it. Those are the sleep tricks that work for us–for the time being, naturally! I know things often change once teething begins, but I also think that establishing good sleep routines from the beginning helps a lot. I kept seeing people online talk about a 4-month sleep regression, but I don’t think we’ve had to deal with that. Every night is pretty much golden! (Not to press my luck or anything.) I’m happy to elaborate on anything you’re interested in hearing more about.

Happy sleeping!