The great-aunt and -uncle from the Eastern Shore of MD came to visit! Here are some pictures. The first part of their CO vacation was in Boulder, so we hung out with them mainly at our house and downtown. I was so impressed at how well Emily did during our outing to Pearl Street. She napped in the carrier while we wandered around, managed to eat some of her bottle in front of the Boulder Court House, and even survived getting passed around the dinner table at a restaurant (Sforno Trattoria Romano – excellent food!) OK, to be honest I guess I’m mostly just proud of ourselves for braving the outdoors and the downtown restaurant scene with a 4.5 month old.
Emily is making such rapid developmental gains that it’s been a whirlwind few weeks and blog posting has fallen by the wayside. But I’d really rather not let it go more than a week – I don’t want to forget all these amazing leaps! I also don’t want our tiny circle of internet followers to get too frustrated by unpredictable updates here. So I’m going to really try to do Sunday updates, at least for year 1.
August 28th – Squishy baby toes.
Before Marg and Phil came to visit, Emily had just started really exploring the range of her voice – both in tone and VOLUME! The screeching is magnificent. I’m sure I will one day take back that statement, but for now it is so wonderful to hear her outbursts of excitement while playing. Then just a couple weeks later, she started experimenting with the “Oh”, “Ah” and “Eh” vowels (those are her particular favorites right now – I haven’t heard much “Ee”s or “Oo”s yet).
There are hints of consonants in there too, enough that Mommy can imagine that she’s actually saying real words. I’m convinced that she’s already said “Hello”, “Milk” and “Hungry”. There’s no way that’s possible though. I mean. Is there? Well, she couldn’t understand what those words mean yet, but they certainly are highly probable words around this house, so why not? I have a very overactive imagination though, and am prone to auditory hallucinations, so the jury’s still out on that. For now!
August 30th – Auntie Marg and Uncle Phil have arrived!
Concurrent to Margan Phil’s visit, Emily also started rolling over onto her tummy – with gusto! She’s unstoppable now. She can stay on her back only so long before flipping, and she seems to prefer sleeping tummy-side-down. We do try, if we can possibly do it without waking her too much, to encourage back sleeping, but it doesn’t always happen. The AAP does say that once they can roll, it’s ok to leave them in whatever position they’re in to fall asleep, as it means that they’re neurologically mature enough now to be able to adjust if they’re not getting enough oxygen. But I’m not buying that (yet). We’ll give her at least another couple weeks of “back to sleep” (unless it makes her falling asleep impossible).
Speaking of sleep, I’ve been reading “Precious Little Sleep” by Alexis Dubief, which is an extremely well-researched book on baby sleep. I joined the facebook group created by the author many months ago, but was finding myself getting lost and confused by all of the member’s questions. So much contradictory advice, huge ranges of what constitutes “normal”, and impossible to piece together a coherent strategy from piecemeal posts. Then there was a pattern of commenters responding with “Dude, just read the book! 99% of all your questions are answered there!” So I figured I should just stop the madness and do that.
August 31st – So … this is still happening. This is a kid with some serious FOMO.
I’m only a quarter of the way through the book, so I don’t have all the magic yet, but we’re working on several things now. The first thing is having Emily in the bassinet in our bedroom all night (instead of being held by Dad until 2am). This has been quite successful, except that I still feel like I wake up 20 times a night for 5 minutes. That adds up to a lot of missed sleep! She doesn’t cry, but she’s just a very noisy sleeper. We tried adding white noise last night, and that seemed to make things much much worse (for me, not for Emily). But we’ll have to experiment with that before ruling it out.
The other thing I’m “working” on (more like “flailing at”) is getting her to sleep in her crib during the day. So far, she will only do that for nap #1 of the day (6am to 7:30am). Anything beyond that has been an epic fail, so I will have to read on.
August 31st – Hellooo!
August 31st – At The Cup on Pearl Street