Friday, January 23, 2009

Hectic Week

It has been a bit of a crazy week! Molly has been really fussy all week, and she has not wanted to nap or sleep at night. However....right now it is 6:30AM, and she is still asleep. I, on the other hand, cannot sleep anymore so I decided to get up and take advantage of the little bit of quiet before Molly wakes up. I hope I can make it all the way through this post. :) I suppose she is teething. We've been saying that for months now, but this seems to be the worst she has felt. I know that the fussiness is exacerbated by the lack of sleep so hopefully she will feel better today. I have been just getting up with her and trying to rock her back to sleep, instead of bringing her to our bed and feeding her every time she wakes up. It is more difficult for me, but I don't want to get her or us in the habit of just bringing her to our bed to sleep. I usually fall asleep while feeding her because I just put her down between us. Sometimes I wake up and take her back to bed, and sometimes she just stays there for a while. She usually wakes up a half hour or so later, so maybe she just does want to eat. Regardless, hopefully we are back on path for her to sleep most nights through, and we will not need to worry about this much more.

We got Molly a booster seat on Monday so she has been able to sit at the table with us to eat her meals. It has worked out beautifully. She really enjoys sitting in it and watching us. She can entertain herself a bit by just looking around at us, at Daisy, and at other things in the room. She is really loving her veggies. She has eaten broccoli potatoes. She really likes broccoli, and she is rather indifferent to the potatoes (but she still ate quite a bit of them). We also gave her lentils again, and now she digs them. Next up: beets. I still have a lot of frozen food from before I left for Louisville, but I am almost out so I need to make some more batches of food, the first of which will be beets. They're high in iron and very pretty. Hopefully with a little butter she will like them and not get herself stained. I might take off her shirt to feed her, just in case.

We rearranged our apartment this week so now Molly pretty much, but not quite, has her own room. We moved the office things out to the living room so that Molly has room to play in her room, and we can rock with her in the chair in her room.

The weather her, until Wednesday, has been beautiful, with temperatures in the 70s. We went to the Berkeley marina on Monday and enjoyed a picnic, looking out over the Bay. Molly had a great time sitting and lying on the blanket in the sun. You all know me--I did a good job keeping the sun from hitting her directly.

Wednesday is my first day back to teaching, so Bill will be with Molly by himself longer than he ever has been. We both are a little nervous about how Molly will do going so many hours without nursing. She will have plenty of food and milk to drink from the bottle, but she really is comforted by nursing, and it usually helps her to sleep. We have been trying to give her at least two bottles a day to get her used to it, and she is getting much better at taking her milk that way.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Happy New Year!

Wednesday:
It's been a while since I last posted so it will be difficult to remember everything that has happened. First, though, I would like to say that I am rather happy to be back to California, where the temperature today reached 77. I really, really miss Louisville already, but I heard that there were record cold temperatures today. I was wearing a t-shirt and no jacket today. Okay, enough about the weather.

Molly and I spent four weeks in Louisville. It was supposed to be three weeks and 6 days, but my flight from Chicago to Oakland was canceled due to inclement weather so I stayed in Louisville an extra night. While we were in Kentucky, Molly started turning over from her belly to her back, and she started to sit up for very long stretches. Her sleeping worsened, though. Before we left, she was mostly sleeping through the night, but she slept through the night only once while we were in KY, and she usually woke up multiple times through the night. About halfway through the visit, I theorized that she may be uncomfortable in the Pack n Play so I started to put her in the bed with Bill and me. It seemed to work. I guess she was getting too heavy to sleep comfortably with such a small pad.

Saturday:
I had to take a break, but I'm back now. We had a wonderful time in Louisville, and we got to see lots of extended family, most of whom met Molly for the first time.

Molly has been recently introduced to a number of new foods including papaya (liked it for two days, but not so much after that) and broccoli (LOVES it, but it is kind of dry so she probably needs a drink in the middle of a feeding). We are working our way up to three meals per day, but she just still loves to nurse so much that we are usually having one or two feedings per day of fruit or vegetable. The pediatrician says that is fine--she is getting plenty of nutrition from the breastmilk, and the milk should be her main source of nutrition now anyway. We don't want to cause any stress; we want eating to be pleasurable for Molly, and if we force it too much she may resist it more. She is clearly gaining weight (weighing in at 21 pounds on Thursday) so we can take our time.

When we got back to CA on Tuesday, we put Molly in her crib for the night. It was the first night I had not slept in the same room with Molly since she came home from the hospital. It went well. She woke up a couple of times for the first few nights, but Thursday night she just woke up one time, and last night she slept until about 5:40, which I consider sleeping through the night because Bill and I got more than 6 hours of sleep. She is sleeping right now, and I am hopeful that she will sleep well again tonight!