a Legacy

I come from a family of strong-willed women.

We speak our minds.

We're independent.

We're stubborn.

We stand up for what we believe in.

We're not afraid of confrontation.

We sometimes always insist on doing things the hard way.

We like to figure things out for ourselves.

We sometimes get in trouble.

Avery is no different.

So when she insists on holding her own bottle, hits my hand away when I attempt to feed her and gets mad when I try to help her with things, I have to kind of smile inside because she is one of us.  It's frustrating, to be sure, but it's her legacy to be tenacious, persistent, and unrelenting. 

It's amazing to me that she was born such a tiny baby with such a big personality.  I used to think all babies were kind of the same.  They all looked the same to me and I assumed they all behaved similarly.  I see now that I was very wrong.  They come to earth, little pre-packaged assemblies of clever charisma and their own unique charm.  

I can do nothing to change her (and why would I want to?).  My only hope is to stand by her side as she speaks her mind, embraces her independence, learns some compliance, stands up for what she believes in, fights fairly, learns the hard way, figures things out for herself, and yes, even sometimes gets into trouble.  

But hopefully not too much trouble.

5 Months Sleep Deprived

I've heard there are people out there who have children who were born good sleepers.
We are not those people.  And this is our story.

Avery slept a good majority of her first 3 weeks of life and I remember thinking "Ah! This is fantastic!  All she does is sleep all the time!"  And then she turned 3 weeks old and pretty much overnight everything was different.  She would stay fast asleep if I was holding her, but the moment she was put down, she would freak out.  From the very beginning, she preferred to sleep on her stomach which is such a no-no for little babies but sometimes I let her sleep on her stomach for nap time because for heaven's sake we all needed sleep!

Nap times were rough, but at night it was even worse.  She'd go to bed about 6 or 7 but she'd be up AT LEAST every 2 hours the whole freaking night.  Eventually I decided we had to split the night into shifts so Kyle and I could have some hope of getting any sleep at all.  He's on duty from bedtime to 1:00 AM.  I take the 1:00 AM til morning shift.  This helped, but no one really slept well.  For 5 whole months, it was a round the clock battle to help Avery sleep.

As a result, we became very, very sleep deprived.

Around 5 months, I decided we had to try some kind of sleep training because I was absolutely going to die if we did not get some normal sleep happening around here.  I picked up a book our insurance company had sent me early in my pregnancy, "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child."  I'd heard great things about "Babywise" and "Happiest Baby on the Block" but I am cheap and didn't want to go out and buy a new book.  So I read the free one I had.

I'm telling you that book became, for me, the Bible of sleep training.  I was so skeptical in the beginning but every little tip I tried worked!  I love that it covers an array of possible problems and ages and gives enough flexibility for you to find a solution that works for your family.

This is Avery's current sleep schedule, which has been in place and effective for 2-3 months now (thanks to my "Sleep Bible"):
7:00 AM wakeup
9:00 AM nap for 1 1/2 to 2 HOURS!
1:00 PM nap for 1 1/2 to 2 HOURS!
4:30 PM nap for 45 min.
7:30 PM bedtime
3:00 AM feeding

It's amazing!
Every time she goes to sleep on her own I am so freakin' proud of her.
I'm still in shock every day that she naps for more than an hour at a time.  For months I had so much anxiety about her sleeping that I'm kind of afraid to even say anything about it.  I mean, will I jinx it?  If I celebrate her good sleeping, will it suddenly backfire?  I sure hope not.  Because this sleep schedule rocks.

We started sleep training around Christmas time and let me tell you, that was probably a really bad idea.  "Merry" and "Happy" don't go well at all with letting your 5 month old baby cry for 45 minutes until she falls asleep.  I got a lot of crap for being the "sleep Nazi" too.  I was convinced that if we stuck to it, eventually she would catch on.  Seriously, it was totally worth it.  Most of the time now I will just lie her in her crib when it's nap time and she will talk herself to sleep.  Hardly any crying.  And she wakes up happy!

Did I mention this is amazing?!?  It still absolutely blows my mind.  I wish I would have read this book when Avery was first born because there are things we could have done from the very beginning to help her get the sleep she needs.  I think I just kind of expected that babies are born knowing how to sleep and eat.  You don't really think about those as being learned skills, but they really are.

I'm still apprehensive for whenever baby #2 will happen because the mere thought of reliving the no sleep for 5 months thing sends me into a panic attack.  Hopefully next time I'll be more prepared.

Seriously seriously if you have a baby I totally recommend sleep training.  (Unless you're one of those aforementioned superpeople with supersleeper babies.  And if you are, then I send internet stinkeye your way)  I can't say anything about the other methods out there, but "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" absolutely saved my life.  I'm not even joking.  No sleep makes me a very miserable person (just ask Kyle).

9 Months

Avery is 9 months!

Stats

Weight: 16 lbs. 14 oz.

Height: 28 1/2"

Milestones

Blows kisses

Cut tooth #4 #5 AND #6!!!  (not fun)

Stands briefly by herself

Not a lot has really changed since last month.

She still LOVES shoes and babies.

And Baby Einstein, of course.

She laughs when she sees a baby doll.

She's mostly sleeping through the night (HALLELUJAH) and has 2-3 good naps every day.

And if she gets mad in the car, we bark at her and she starts to laugh.

I love this crazy baby with all her boisterous personality.

8 Months

Avery is 8 months!

Stats

Weight: 16 lbs. 1 oz.

Height: 27"

Milestones

Avery pulls herself up to stand on just about anything.

She gives lots of sloppy baby kisses!

Cut tooth #3

She waves!

Climbing stairs, much to my dismay.

Likes

Avery LOVES shoes.  She will work very hard to get a hold of and chew on anyone's shoe she can see.  Are we raising a baby or a puppy?

Have I mentioned she loves Baby Einstein?  Cause pretty much that's the only way I get stuff done now.  I get 20 minutes of do-anything-you-can-before-the-show-is-over time every day.

We also have a very social baby.  She loves other kids and gets so excited when she sees a baby about her size.

Personality

Avery is fearless!  She will go head first for anything she sees that she wants.  I love how she's not afraid of anything, but it also keeps us on our toes!  

She is very determined.  If she sees a shoe across the room, she will crawl over and under anything to get to it.

Sleeping 

Most nights she is just waking up once now, which is amazing!   Her 2 naps a day are also getting longer.

Eating

She loves to eat and will try everything I make for her.  Bananas are definitely not her favorite though.

Positive Positive Positive

link

I know I complain about PKU a lot and someone that lives with me told me I should be more positive. 

(hint: it was not Avery)

Whatever.

I obviously don't feel like being positive about something I am not happy about.

But today we had an all day PKU conference in Salt Lake and it was pretty much nonstop PKU from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.  And you know what?  I really liked it.

It was so nice to talk with other parents and adults with PKU.  Basically, it was just nice to talk to people who get it.  Who know our language.  Who've been through what we're going through.  In our region, we are the newest family with a PKU child so we're kind of the newbies of the group.  But everyone is so nice and so supportive and so helpful!

We learned more about what's in store for us the next 18+ years as Avery learns to manage her diet on her own.  And while the future still makes me anxious, it's maybe not as scary.  At least not for now.

So here's some PKU positives:

A lot of the low protein food is actually really good!

(see: cookies, muffins, pastas)

...

I sat down to write a bunch of positives, and that's all I came up with.

I guess I still need to work on being positive about it.

But I do feel confident that we can do it, and that's a step up from where we started 8 months ago.

On another positive note, my parents were in town for a couple of days and watched Avery while we attended the conference.  (Thanks Mom & Dad!)  Avery was so good for them and they handled her diet without a hitch.  They even kept an accurate diet record for the day!  And my mom helped me whip up some homemade baby food and fight through the difficult (for me) math!  What good parents I have.

And they also bought us toilet paper.

(!)

So there you go.  That's about as positive as it gets.

7 Months!

Avery is 7 months!

Stats

Weight: 14 lbs. 8 oz.

Height: 26"

Likes

Peak-a-boo

Riding in shopping carts

Baby Einstein movies

Babies & kids

Crawling into EVERYTHING

Crawling under small spaces like chairs and tables

Kyle's Boise State slippers.  I don't know what it is about them, but if she's mad, we toss her a slipper and she's totally content for awhile.  Go Broncos?

ME!!  She's become a mama's girl.  Sometimes it's really sweet and sometimes it's really annoying.  But when she reaches for me with her pouty face or pulls on my legs for me to hold her, I feel like the coolest person on the planet.

Anything that makes a plasticky or crinkly sound (Long car drives are often survived by tossing her an unopened bag of chips.  She'll play with that bag forever)

Dislikes

Men.  I don't know, maybe it's because she's home with me all day?  If a man, other than Kyle gets too close to her, she bursts into tears.  It's so sad.

Getting hurt.  Now that she's crawling, she's bonked her head a few times and is really rather dramatic about it.  Also that time I accidentally bit her finger she wasn't too happy with me for a few hours...

Milestones

CRAWLING!!!!

Sit up from laying down on her own

Cut 2 teeth!

NOT screaming every time she's in the car!  (Although she has about a 30 minute car ride maximum before she has a meltdown)

She is a constant babbler.  Lately it's been a lot of "Da da da da da" so Kyle's pretty sure she likes him best (ha).

Personality

She is SO smiley!  It totally melts my heart because it doesn't take much to get her to smile a big gummy smile for me.  And she doesn't even care that I haven't showered for 2 days (shh)

She is so curious about everything and will spend a long time inspecting a new object

Now that she can get sitting up on her own, I'll often find her in her crib (when I think she's been asleep) playing with her binky or scratching the walls.

Sleeping 

We've made some major improvements in the sleeping department.  Most nights she will go to bed 6:30-7:30PM and wake up only once or twice before 7:00AM.

Usually 3 naps a day:  9:00AM and 1:00PM for 60-90 min. and a third nap around 4:00PM for 45 min. or so.

Eating

For the sake of keeping things simple, she gets 1-2 meals of homemade baby food a day.  

She loves to eat, especially whenever we're eating and she devours whatever we feed her.

She loves apricots, peas, carrots and avocado and is trying out puffs for the first time (not quite sure about those yet)

Baby Friends

Avery & Ainslie are about 2 months apart.

I love that they're old enough now to play together.

Which pretty much means they just grab at each other and make baby noises.

But I still love it.

It means they like each other.

(I think?)

Phenomenon

I don't want to say anything because I might be a little superstitious...

But if I were to say something, I might tell you that this baby face might have slept for something like 10 hours straight last night.

10.

She's still sick so I don't know if this is sick-related, but knock on wood (Kyle hates when I do that) I hope it becomes the norm.

Have I mentioned how psycho-crazy I become when sleep deprived?

And have I mentioned that for the better part of the last SIX months, we haven't slept for one night uninterrupted?

That's over 180 nights of waking 2-40 times.

Psycho. Crazy.

I came to the point where I started to think that if I could just have four hours of uninterrupted sleep, I could maintain sanity.  FOUR HOURS, that's all I ask!  That's not really so much is it?

So you can imagine how elated I was when we put Avery down for bed at 6:00 PM and I didn't have to get up to feed her until 4:00 AM.  And then she slept another 2 1/2 hours.

I mean, if I were to say something

(knock on wood)

Now if only I could get myself to go to bed at 6:00 PM, then I could really capitalize on this phenomenon.

But let's be honest here, I don't see that happening like ever.

I kind of miss her when she's sleeping.

Bottle Holder

Over the last couple of months, Avery has been working on holding her own bottle.

I fully support this new development.

Bath Baby

In the beginning, Avery hated baths.

She cried and screamed so much I hated giving her baths.

So it quickly became Kyle's responsibility.

But over the last few months, she's learned to love bath time.

(Thank goodness)

Only now she cries when we take her out.

She sits!

Yep, she's sittin' up on her own!

Worst Mom Ever

Well, the days of letting Avery sleep in the swing are over.

Until the last few days, I could lay her in there and she'd sleep soundly for a few hours... and I wouldn't buckle her in.  If I buckled her in, she'd wake up.

The other day I caught her trying to roll over in her sleep.  While she was in the swing!  I jumped up and ran over to her just as she made it over the edge.  She didn't fall though, she was hanging off the edge with her legs dangling over.  Still asleep!

Pretty much I felt like the worst mom ever.

I wasn't sure if I should laugh, because she looked so cute and funny, or if I should cry because my baby nearly rolled out of the swing.  And it was my fault!  

She just insists on sleeping on her stomach now.
Which means she only naps in the crib from now on... and no more unbuckled rides in the swing.
And I hang my head in shame.

5 Months!

Avery is 5 months!

Stats

Weight: 12 lbs. 8 oz.

Height: 24"

Likes

Grabbing faces

Anything that makes a crinkly, plasticky sound

Mirrors

Fake sneezes

Chewing on everything (hands, feet, tables, books...)

Whatever you have

Baths

Books

Sleeping on her tummy

Dislikes

Anytime you wipe her face

Middle of the night diaper changes

Milestones

She can hold her own bottle!

Falling asleep on her own!  Without crying!! (Or a maybe just a little crying)

Smiling at her reflection in the mirror

Started the counting foods part of the PKU diet

Almost outgrown 0-3 month clothes

Definitely outgrown size 1 diapers

Remembering how to roll over from tummy to back (she forgot for a month or so)

B-A-N-A-N-A-S

Today we tried bananas.

I thought for sure she'd love it.

 This, to me, does not look like the face of a baby who loves the bananas.

She did eat it anyway, but the general theme of the day was "let's get bananas on all of the things."

Seriously.  Banana.  Everywhere.

ALL of the things.

Unfortunate consequences of feeding the baby fresh banana puree:

*Every part of banana that ended up on her onesie turned it brown. (which was a lot)

*Banana puree turns brown in the fridge.

*Brown banana spit up.

*Brown banana spit up.

*Brown banana spit up.

I'm tempted to only feed her applesauce for the rest of her baby life.

About Sleep

I hate to say anything because I don't want to jinx it.... but I think we might, we just might be getting somewhere in sleep training over here.  We started the process last Thursday so it's been one full week and it's not been easy, I tell you.  Katifriend has had to hold my hand the whole way via supportive text messages. 

I've done a lot of reading and polling of friends who sleep train and this is what we've come up with for ourselves:

*Establish nap pattern.  Morning nap an hour after wake up time.  Afternoon nap within 2 hours after waking from morning nap.  Sometimes a third nap around 4PM if she wakes up early from the afternoon nap.  If she wakes up happy from a nap I know she is rested.  If she wakes up crying, I rock her back to sleep.

*We give her a bath between 6PM-7PM then feed her a bottle and lay her down while she is sleepy but still awake.

*Then the hardest part ever: she cries.  At first we'd go in and soothe her every 10 minutes until she stayed asleep but the last few days we've let her cry for up to 40 minutes without soothing her.  It's heartbreaking.  But the beautiful thing?  She now goes to sleep on her own!  This is HUGE.

 For 3 nights in a row she's gone to sleep on her own (tonight it only took 20 minutes) and she STAYS ASLEEP until about 2AM for a feeding.  And then she STAYS ASLEEP until 6:30AM.

I am so proud and happy right now I could cry.

I just hope this continues and gets even better.  I'd love for her to only cry a few minutes before falling asleep or, better yet, not cry at all. But we're getting there. 

It's been really difficult for us to come to the point where we're letting her cry it out some.  Before I was born, I had a brother, Blake, who died at 4 months of SIDS.  This has constantly been on my mind since Avery was born and I've worried so much about how she's sleeping, letting her cry, what's in her crib, etc.

Two things helped me get over this:

1. Avery is now older than 4 months.  I know SIDS can still be a risk until she is 1 or something, but in my mind, she's older than Blake was and it feels like the risk isn't so much there anymore.

2.  We were so freaking sleep deprived we could hardly function.  It took a long time to get Avery to sleep and stay asleep every  night and even then she'd wake up at least 3 or 4 times every single night.  And that was a good night.  On a bad night we were up every hour or more.  No joke.  We had to do something.  We were desperate!

A couple of nights during the last week were terrible and she woke up a lot and cried a lot and we didn't get any sleep.  But having a few days of success in a row is encouraging and I think Avery is really responding well to it now.  We are also learning to read her more and understand when she is getting sleepy so we don't let her get overtired.

So there you have it. That's our plan. I like our plan because I feel like we are teaching Avery how to sleep while being flexible enough to adjust to what she needs.

I like it most because so far it is working.

And thank goodness.

I've really missed my sleep.

Santa Baby

I think maybe I should rename this blog "Avery Adventures" because it's pretty much all about her anymore. 

Sorry, guys.

Hope you like babies!

I promised myself when I became a mom I wouldn't let my blog become 100% baby but the truth of it is, I don't know anything else anymore!  I'm so out of touch with life before baby.  

So it's either, I don't post much at all, or I post about Avery.

So here's more about Avery!

We took our Santa Baby to the church Christmas party.

No one tried to sit on her lap, though.

Hah.

Bald dad's are great for teething babies!

His favorite is when she spits up on his head.

Or when drool runs down his face.

What a good dad :)

Very Busy

If you're wondering where we've been the last few days, we have been very busy not sleeping.

This is all Avery's fault.

I mean, I hate to point fingers.... but it is kinda true.

In 3 days, the longest she slept in one interval was 2 hours and the "best" part is, she seemed totally happy about it!  Normally she'll crash by 7:30 PM every night.  Last night she stayed up until 10:00 smiling and giggling no matter what we tried to do to put her to bed.  It's kind of hard to be mad when she's being so cute.

We're *this close* to trying the 100% cry it out method.  Only we just can't do it.  We do let her cry for 10-15 minutes at a time, but usually she gets so worked up it takes twice as long to get her calmed down again.  And then we're sad.

But do you know what else makes us sad?

Not sleeping.

Poor Kyle had to go to work today with pretty much zero sleep.

I keep telling myself that this is just a phase and we'll get through it... she'll learn to sleep better... she'll finally cut teeth... she'll figure out how to roll the other way in her sleep (instead of just getting stuck on her belly)... it could be worse.

(?)

Pretty much this solidifies the fact that I am 100% NOT ready to have another baby just yet.

Not that I'd been thinking about it or anything...

And here's a gratuitous pic of Avery being cute.

It's what gets me through the tough times.

I like to call this one "West Side" for (hopefully) obvious reasons.

(And anyway you could say that we do, in fact live on the west side...)

...Even though...

I've decided that 4 months is my favorite age so far...even though Avery still wakes up 2-20 times a night and therefore we have been severely sleep deprived for over 120 days.

I mean really, she is so cute I could scream.

Especially in her new baby skinny jeans.

  4 months is great because:

She's interested in toys and grabbing at things and babbling on occasion.

Sometimes, if I'm really patient, I can make her laugh.

She stops crying at night when she hears our voices.

She's trying really hard to hold her own bottle

Her personality is starting to really come through.

She is so fun to play with!

...even if we're still sleep deprived.

4 Months

Avery is 4 months!

Stats

Weight: 12 lbs. 3 oz.

Height: 24"

Likes

Baby massage

Pulling Mom's hair

Cameras

Swing

Riding on Dad's shoulders & slobbering on his bald head

Toys

Books

Chewing on blankets

Spitting up

Dislikes

Booger removal

Going to sleep

The car... still

Milestones

Laughing

Rolling from back to tummy

Holding her feet

Eating solids (applesauce!)

Applesauce

We were eating dinner at the table and Avery just wanted to sit with us.  So I plopped her in the high chair and she watched us eat.  She was so interested in our dinner, we decided it was time for her to try baby food!  Because of PKU, we are starting Avery on applesauce because apples have very little PHE (maybe none?) so she can eat them all she wants without raising her PHE levels.

She was hesitant at first and even made a few faces, but then if we didn't keep the applesauce coming fast enough she'd scream and throw her arms around until she got another bite.

  I think that means she liked it.

 Even if most of it ended up on her clothes.