And she's starting climbing up stairs. Yet Ivy still isn't interested in sitting like a normal baby. No way!
Ivy is very sensitive to other people. If she's in my arms or Eric's, she smiles at everyone and makes noises to get their attention. But if I pass her on to someone...the world is ending! Go away scary stranger! (even when it's grandma).
Sleep is pretty much awful. With rare exceptions, Ivy wakes up every 2 hours at night starting at around 11 pm. That translates into me getting about 1 1/2 hours of sleep at a time, factoring in how long it takes to nurse her and put her back down. It's hard to sustain this week after week, month after month.
I've tried various things to see if I can help her sleep longer stretches, but they just fail. Patting her on the back or holding and rocking her? She gets furious. Letting her fuss and seeing if she'll settle herself back down? Nope. She'll cry for an hour or more and still be wide awake. I've resigned myself to just nursing her as soon as she wakes up. It's the least bad solution.
But you know what? I can live with the mind-numbing fatigue. I've lived through it three other times, and I've survived. Eventually babies start to sleep. It gets better. And there's so much about this stage that I love and will miss terribly when it's over.
Awww, Rixa, she's so sweet. Last time I saw you she was in your uterus. Thanks for posting these. Love from Vancouver.
ReplyDeleteIvy is beautiful and so sweet! My third daughter's development was just like Ivy's. Crawled at 6 months and pulled up to stand shortly after. She walked at 10 months :). She was very high needs and in arms (carrier) constantly until all of this development and then she became a happy, mobile baby. She is still an intense, passionate kid at 9 years old.
ReplyDeleteSo gorgeous, and don't you hate it when you hear that thunk that means she has gone over backwards and connected with the floor !~! We have soft pine floors so it doesn't really "hurt" the baby but it's startling and painful and he hates it too. Soon he'll be walking and then Oh My Stars, bar the doors, it's going to get exciting.
ReplyDeleteRixa, this is such a great attitude. It is a gift to Ivy but also a gift to yourself. Our fourth baby, Iris, sounds very much like Ivy. Crawling at 5 months, walking by 9 months, pulls up and climbs everything. She was high need and a terrible sleeper. We weren't sure if she would be our last and so I really treasured the time. Also, we adopted our third child and after spending time in the adoption community where many are there for reasons related to infertility, I realized how much I had taken for granted in my previous pregnancies and how kind of spoiled/entitled my attitude was. With my first two, in part because of the unrealistic expectations of so many Americans in general, I expected my babies to sleep through the night by 4- 6 months and I expected a lot more time for myself. With our third and fourth babies, I was really able to surrender those expectations and just soak it all in - which was an incredible blessing. Until my daughter was 20 months old, I let her fall asleep on my chest and pretty much settled in for the evening. Then I finally felt it was time to move her toward breaking the habit of only nursing to sleep, because I really was exhausted and catching every little virus that went around. We did some sleep training, where my husband sat our bedroom with her while she fell asleep in her crib. Then I nightweaned her, and man, it does feel great and I am loving getting things done again. My husband and I think we really would like to have another baby, but, it's funny - where I once worried that I would always have that ache for another, I now really enjoy my independence, great sex life that my hormones previously dampened, and feeling well rested. Now we keep putting off when we'd like to start 'trying' and I told my husband just last night how thankful I was we were using protection... at least for now! :) (Sorry if that's TMI!) :D
ReplyDeleteOh and one thing that really helped our daughter tremendously was seeing a chiropractor. She was born posterior and after her first adjustment she slept for almost two days straight. I also found it helped to get off of dairy. As a lactation counselor, it bothers me to no end that so many people think their babies have allergies to their milk because many prematurely wean for this reason. But after spending hours on Pub Med, some of the research does suggest the bad sleep + eczema can be related to a cow's milk sensitivity. Getting off of dairy may have helped her sleep and definitely cleared up her skin. But the no dairy + chiro helped her sleep well about 1/2 of the time, which helped me be well rested half of the time, and made those tough nights manageable.
My first is a month behind Ivy and sound so much like her with the crawling/constant moving, the playing with the ear while nursing and the freaking out when handed off to another person! Sleep was definitely a major issue for us until we did some serious sleep training. Now she's down to a manageable 2 night feeds. If you start to feel like sleep deprivation is becoming a danger (like falling asleep at the wheel), I recommend the Babycenter Teaching your baby to sleep board. You can post Ivy's schedule and the problems you've been having and you'll get a lot of good, personalized advice from the other moms (the stickied info on the board is a goldmine as well). Anyway, I'll be checking back every month to see what Ivy's up to/what's in store for my little mover!
ReplyDeleteShe's so beautiful; the time between crawling and walking is one of my absolute favorite baby stages.
ReplyDeleteYou have a good attitude about sleep. My third baby (almost two years old now) is also crappy sleeper but the beauty of the third baby for me is that I just don't care like I did when the first baby was a bad sleeper. I am sure that one day she will sleep all the way through night and I am really not interested in stressing her or myself over the issue. She was a big fan of the wake up every two hours schedule. We did night wean her from bedtime until 5:00 am when she was about 18 months or so. I say we because Husband did all the work, he rocked her and held her and I tried to sleep while he told her "nursing is asleep now". Now she often sleeps through until 5:00 am and then comes into bed with me for a nurse-a-thon until we get up around 7:30 or so.
Good luck and hopefully the kids will let you get a nap occasionally.