Doctors appointments and such!

     So yesterday, O had her 4 month check up. She's a few weeks behind due to the Christmas Holiday but other than that it went pretty well. She got all of her vaccinations. She was a trooper. She only cried for a minute and then I fed her. This seems to be a solid way of getting her to calm down and take her mind off of her fresh stab wounds in her legs.

    We were told that she is only in the 25 percentile for weight, 50th for height and 40th for head circumfrence. That makes me feel odd (especially her weight) because I look at her and can't believe how big she is now and how much she has grown. I love seeing all of those little rolls on her and squeezing her chunky little legs. I'll have to see about putting up some chunky baby pictures.

   All O wanted to do was sleep, eat and snuggle for most of the day. She took a two hour nap right after we got home from her appointment, which was awesome. That allowed me some more time to work on my parents christmas presents. Yes, you read that right. I'm still working on them. Crafting is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be with a baby. I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to try and handpaint wine glasses for them. I was making a "Death Star" wine glass for my father and a mermaid wine glass for my mom. I'll have to post pictures of those too.

It's New Years Eve and I have an exciting night planned! You know being passed out, drooling all over myself. It will be like old times, except it will hopefully happen around 9:00pm. I do hope that you have a very bright, safe and Happy New Year.

Take two: Transition

Rawr! I'm irritated. I had a word document with all of the progress of O's transition and it's gone. There isn't a way to recover it and now it's just lost in the abyss somewhere. I hate that so much! I'll try my best to go off the top of my head.

Day two: Transition

Well, after yesterdays defeat, I didn't know if I would put her back in her crib. I had my doubts and thought that maybe she wasnt ready and that maybe she still needed me to be right there next to her. I stewed on it for most of the day. I thought that I would just allow her to sleep in her RNP and be done with transitioning for now. Some of the articles, blogs and people I spoke with kind of had me scared of what was going to happen and I just thought, "Oh crap, here we go! Ain't nobody got time for all this mess."
  
  it wasn't until I gave her, her bath and started to nurse her that I made up my mind to go ahead and give her crib another shot. After she nursed, I laid her down  at 8:15 and she fought sleep for about 45 minutes. I soothed her and patted her. When that didn't work, I picked her up for a second and comforted her , refed her, and resang her lullaby. She had a nice big burp during all of this and when I laid her back down, she curled up on her side and passed out almost instantly.
 
She woke up again around 1 am. She wanted to eat and promptly passed out in her crib again as soon as she was done. She didn't wake up again until 7:40am! That is unheard of in my house! I am so proud of my little lady.

Of course what better way to thank her and praise her for doing such a good job? Taking her to the pediatrician for her 4 month check up and shots. Such crappy timing on my part. Good going, mom! -ugh.

Transition: Take 1

Night one:

  I don’t think I have previously shared but I have a very grueling schedule. I work 12 hours shifts with an hour commute on either side. I have to be at work at 6am on the days that I work, so that means I have to be up by 4:00am and out the door no later than 5am. That makes a return home time of 7pm. So on the back of this schedule, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for transitioning and schedule changes. When it comes to rocking the boat, I get extremely nervous on how this will affect our routine. Morning routines more so than night routines,  but routines just the same.

  So with this in mind, we decided to go ahead and take the plunge and put little miss in her crib. We figured it was time to put her in her own room. What’s that? Oh, you know, the awesome nursery that I agonized over for months trying to make it perfect.  Even though, I know this room was meant for her and the idea was to transition her before I went back to work, we (ok me), I just couldn’t wrap my head around kicking her out of our room yet. She was so small and I felt that she “needed” me to be next to her the whole time. Probably more so a case of me needing her than the other way round. So, yes,  the whole idea made me a bit nervous and uneasy.  She has been beside our bed since birth. All I have ever had to do was lean over and she was there. I could hear her soft breathing and was always reassured that she was ok.  That my baby girl was safe and all was right with the world. And when she was crying and the world wasn’t “right”, I could just roll over, grab her and work on “fixing” it.

  So once the decision was made, I just needed to “screw my courage to a sticking place” and get on with putting her in there.  So that’s what I did. 

After I got home from work, we went ahead with her normal night time routine. She got her medicine at 7. Then she played, ate, took her bath, and we went into my bedroom like we were going to bed. We fed one last time to make sure she was good and fed. I then took her into her nursery and began to rock her so that she would become drowsy. I sang her, her lullaby and I put her down in her crib on her back. Almost immediately, I saw O fully waking up, saying “what the heck is this?!” as she cried out in disagreement as to where she was laying her head.

        She ended up fussing for a little over an hour. She was changed, fed, meds given, Picked up,  Burped, Soothed, rocked, sang to, and when I was doing all of those things, she was content, drowsy and wanting to fall asleep. As soon as I laid her down, she woke back up and went back to fussing. Finally I just let her fuss it out. (Only assisting her when she actually started crying) She finally fell asleep at 10:00 after putting her to to bed in the crib at 8:30 pm. This broke my heart but it needed to be done. 

About 40 minutes later, she woke up crying. No, she woke up screaming. I went in there to grab her and she clung to me and I felt even worse. Did she think I abandoned her? My heart couldn’t take any more and she won that battle.  She fed and then promptly passed back out in my arms. I placed her in her rock n play and called it a night.


O: 1  Craftsy: 0 =/

The bedtime conundrum

The bedtime conundrum: Where do we go from here?

This has been an interesting 4 months in regards to O's sleeping arrangements and such. When we brought O home from the hospital, we had her in a little bassinet. After a few glorious nights of sleep (compared to the last few weeks of pregnancy and then the sleepless nights at the hospital) she decided that she had had enough of that and began to wake every 45 minutes. All she wanted to do was eat, be held or to lie on my chest to fall asleep. She would do anything it seemed to stay out of her bassinet and to keep from laying on her back.

Come to find out at around 2 weeks old, O was diagnosed with severe reflux and was put on medicine to try and control it. It was then suggested that we put her in something that would allow her to sleep at an incline. So that was when we heard about things wonderful invention called the rock n play. We ran out in the middle of the night and purchased one at Walmart. It was actually the Snug a Bear rock n play and for the first time at 3 weeks old, we finally got more than 45 minutes of sleep at a time! We slept for 3 and 4 hour stretches! It was glorious.

Then after about 2 weeks in the RNP, she started crying and waking up in the middle of the night every 45 minutes - 1 1/2 hours. It made me want to pull out my hair. She would only sleep long stretches again if she was in my arms or in our bed. We weren't really thrilled about bed sharing/ co sleeping but we did what worked for us those few nights. I went out and bought a co-sleeper because I figured that would be safer than free rolling around with us of the bed. She wasn't a fan of the co-sleeper and only slept in it for less than a week before she was completely over it. So back to the RNP we went.

Fast forward a few more weeks and by week 10 we were in some what of a routine. We half way knew what to expect when we put her down for bed in the rock n play (RNP for short). Come to week 11 though, we were screwed because that was when I returned back to work and it seemed our whole world got flipped upside down. She was no longer going to sleep in her RNP, she tried to buck her bed time and her bed time routine. It was a nightmare for a momma who needed to be up at 4am to go to work. So we incorporated her swing into the mix.

Starting at 12 weeks, we were tired of the long nights and fighting her tooth and nail on sleep. So we put her in the swing at bed time and then transferred her back in her RNP for the rest of the night once she was out. That worked for a couple of weeks. Even though she stopped resisting sleep in the beginning, she was still waking up every 2 to 2 1/2 hours or so to eat or possibly because she was uncomfortable in the RNP.

So this brings us to now. We're at a cross roads. Do we keep her in the RNP where this might be a short fluke and she is familiar with her surroundings but not sleeping as well as she possibly could be? Or do we move her into another sleeping device (Crib, bassinet what have you) and put her in her own room now and just suck it up and hope that this move will make her more comfortable even if it causes some major rocking of the boat/ sleepless inconvenience on our part?

Decisions, decisions.

 

Hi there

Hello there,
  
   My name is Noelle. I'm 29 years old and I'm married to a wonderful man and mother to the most precious little 4 month old girl on this earth. (Yeah, ok, I might be a bit biased) and I have two cats that help complete our little family. I'm employed full time and in my spare time :ha!:  when I'm not with my family, I'm crafting, reading, enjoying a glass of wine or surfing the internet.

 Crafting in general is a release and it relaxes me (Unless I get a project that frazzles me and anyone, who crafts, knows that some projects are just like that.)

I'm hoping that by having this blog, I'll be more motivated to do my crafts and do something for "me". Maybe blogging will help clear my head and allow me a kind of peace. This blog will be filled with my random ramblings. It will be based on my life and my day to day goings on. You'll find all sorts of things in this blog with probably zero order or reason except that it was on my mind that day. You'll find things like crafts, child posts,  recipes, deals /savings posts, excerpts from my life in general as well as things that interest me.

 That's about all I can think about for now.

-N