Better
“Mama, have a snack please?” is definitely better than “SSSSNNNNNAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCCKKKKKKK!” Thanks, Sierra.
Didn’t Sierra turn 18 months…like TWO MONTHS AGO?
Um, yeah… I’m a total slacker blogging mom. Sierra’s changed so much in the last two months, it’s almost like she’s a completely different person from the kid she was in June. I had lots of video clips that I meant to post, but they’re all kind of out of date at this point. Rather than detail what Sierra was like at 18 months, I’ll mostly try to recap some of what’s been going on since June 6th.
Let’s start with her 18 month well check and stats – at her appointment, she was 21 lbs, 5 oz (10th percentile) and 31 inches (25th percentile). That’s TINY for a child of mine. Even yesterday, she only weighed in at 22.2 lb on our bathroom scale. How’d that 8 lb, 7 oz baby turn into such a peanut? Though she doesn’t always eat a huge amount in any one sitting, she definitely has a good appetite – like when she starts shrieking that she wants lunch at 10 am. The doctor pronounced her healthy and fabulous, and again commented that her verbal skills are quite advanced. She got two shots, in her arms rather than in her legs at my request, since in the past the shots haven’t bothered her as much when given in the arms. She didn’t even notice the first one – she was way too distracted by getting a bandaid (“Sticker!!!”) – and she cried for maybe 5 seconds after the next one, stopping as soon as she got another Band-Aid (“TWO stickers!!!”).
Shortly after Sierra turned 18 months old, she started really combining words, and now she gives us everything from single words to short phrases (“Baby fall down”) to complete sentences (“Mommy, where did Daddy go?” or “I have a dolly. Look, Mom!”). The first completely spontaneous sentence that I noticed her saying was “Mommy, I like peppers!” She also sings whole songs, often at hilariously loud volumes. Some of her favorites are:
- The Alphabet Song
- Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
- Where is Thumbkin?
- Happy Birthday
- Rain, Rain, Go Away
- The theme song from the show “Weeds” (not that we let her watch that!)
Her articulation has improved greatly, though Lex and I can certainly understand her better than someone who doesn’t know her would. Much like her big sister, she is pretty shy around people she doesn’t know too well and will clam up. She’s learning how to count – currently she’s got “One, two, three, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen” down pat – and she can identify several shapes. Though she can’t consistently identify colors yet, she can match them like a pro, especially with her Melissa and Doug fish puzzle. Puzzles are a big thing for her, actually. She adores them! She also greatly enjoys the Biscuit books, Dora and Diego (and has a few Spanish phrases in her everyday vocabulary, courtesy of those two), and all baby dolls.
Sierra’s love for Anya has grown to near idol worship. As soon as she hears Anya make any noise in the morning, she begins shouting, “Anya wake up! Play in Anya room!” She always wants to share with her big sister, too. She has these two baby dolls that she likes to take with her when we go out, but she has to take both of them and not just one, because she needs “ONE FOR ANYA!” She’s always going over to give her hugs and kisses, especially if Anya gets upset or hurts herself. They play together very nicely for the most part, too, and anything Anya does, Sierra wants to do, too.
What else? Let’s see. We are continuing to work on potty training. Sierra loves to pee both on the toilet and in her diaper equally, but she knows what she’s supposed to do, and will gladly tell anyone else who goes to the toilet that they are a big girl. She had been resistant to pooping on the toilet for several weeks after having had some success, but in the last few days she’s been doing a much better job – and she loves getting hand stamps and stickers as a reward. As for sleeping, Sierra is doing beautifully. After a short bedtime routine, she goes in the crib awake and often puts herself to sleep by singing or talking herself. Our only big complaint is that we wish she would sleep later . We can deal with the 6 am wake up call, but when it gets closer to 5 am, it’s rough. Sierra is still a little imp – climbing on whatever she can, standing on stools and shouting “One, two, three, jump!” (but she doesn’t jump, thankfully), sneaking up to the landing on the stairs and taunting me with, “Mommy… Up so high!” – but she’s also a total sweetheart, showering us with unprompted hugs, kisses, I love yous, pleases, thank yous, and excuse mes all the time. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again anyway: I think we’ll keep her.
A little mint
We went out to dinner with friends tonight. Sierra, oddly enough, refused to taste my cake, even though she had been chanting, “Cake, cake, cake, cake!” up until the time it was brought to the table. However, she was extremely excited when they brought the little (Andes-style) mints to the table and insisted that she wanted one. Who am I to tell her what she will or won’t like? I gave her one. She took a tiny little bite, which she pulled out of her mouth to hand to me, and then took a bigger one, which she followed with an enormous shudder and the exclamation, “COLD! BRRRRRR!”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Roseola Take 2
Sierra had a pretty substantial fever from Thursday night until Sunday morning or so, with no other notable symptoms other than being cranky. I had mentioned to a friend that I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up having roseola, and lo and behold, the rash showed up this morning. She still clearly did not feel well today – a total Jekyll and Hyde case, switching from somewhat happy to angry tears with almost no notice. Poor baby. She ended up going to sleep before 7, so hopefully she won’t be up at 3 am (not that that would be any different from the last few weeks, unfortunately, but at least she usually goes back to sleep). Oh, and although the roseola rash isn’t supposed to itch, she’s been scratching at her head all day, which, oddly enough, was the same reaction Anya had when she had roseola.
Sierra is 15, er, almost 16 months old!
Sierra turned 15 months old on March 6th (That’s 1 and 1/4 years!) and since we are just a few days away from her 16 month birthday, I figured it was time to stop procrastinating and actually write this post. She had her well check on the 9th – 20 lbs, 4 oz and 30 1/2 inches – kind of a peanut! She’s healthy in all respects. The doctor once again commented on both her advanced verbal skills and her rather strong will. The rest of her stats? Size 4 diapers, size 3 shoes, in between 9-12 months and 12-18 months clothes, and 14 teeth.
This child has a lot to say and is rarely quiet at home. When we’re out and about or in a big group, though, she takes a long time to warm up. Her articulation has gotten much better, but you still need to know her to understand her well. She has a huge vocabulary, including many names and a lot of short phrases. Some of my favorites: I don’t know; Hi, birdies; wash your hands; come with me; hahaha, funny; and I love you. She loves music and tries to sing several songs, including “ABC” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider” – and she actually gets a few words and an approximation of the tune. “Two” is a frequent request of hers. She must have two of everything, at least according to her.
Sierra walks very well and climbs on whatever she can. She drags a stool over to Anya’s bed so she can get up there, scootches off, and then climbs up again. I am constantly pulling her off of stools and grabbing her off the stairs. She loves the little rocking chair in Anya’s room!
On the whole, Sierra’s sleep is pretty good, at least compared to how it had been just a few months ago. She can be put down awake, even for most naps, and will go to sleep on her own. The past few days she’s been getting up in the middle of the night, but before that she had been sleeping until between 5 and 5:30 am, coming into our room to nurse, and then going back to sleep with us until Anya wakes up and clomps into our room. Oh, and she’s found a “lovey” at last. Sierra has to sleep with her Spot doll. We have gotten a back up, just in case.
Weirdly enough, aside from just now forming an attachment to a doll, she has taken a recent interest in pacifiers and baby food. The former she wanted to hold in her mouth for several days, but she wasn’t sucking or chewing on them, just clenching them between her teeth. I think they helped ease some of her teething discomfort. She likes the idea of them, still, but is usually done after a few moments. The latter she will now happily eat, but only if given a spoon of her own so she can feed herself while I help. She’s pretty good at it, actually.
Sierra eats quite well much of the time now. She still loves proteins more than anything, but has become quite fond of bananas, broccoli, and of course, peas. At the time of her 15 months appointment, she wasn’t drinking much milk regularly, but she’s improving. She still nurses twice a day.
Wipes are still among Sierra’s favorite play things, but baby dolls are her current obsession. She carries them everywhere, walks them around in strollers, tells me “poop” and wants to change their diapers, feeds them, etc. She has one doll which is actually a My Little Pony unicorn that Anya got for her birthday, and frequently she insists that we take it with us if we’re leaving the house. If I mention getting her shoes, she’ll start to walk towards the garage, and then run back to the playroom with an almost frantic, “Baby! Baby!” Also high up on Sierra’s list of favorites are stickers and books. She’s constantly bringing a book over to me, declaring, “Read it! Sit!” while forcefully climbing into my lap. There are several she prefers and asks for by name.
Babies, wipes, and books are great, but Anya is Sierra’s favorite person in the world. In the morning, Sierra usually asks for Anya first thing, and you can frequently hear her calling, “Anya, Anya!” throughout the day. She often cries when I drop Anya off at school. Sierra loves to copy everything Anya does, and unprompted walks over to her big sister to give her kisses (Sierra is actually really big on giving kisses and saying, “I love you,” and I love it). They giggle, hold hands, and can be so sweet together, at least when they aren’t arguing over a toy, but they generally get along very well and I hope it lasts.
So, here’s a video that is already pretty dated since it’s been a month or more since I filmed these clips, but she’s still cute, so enjoy:
Sleeping
Fourteen-and-a-half months later, Sierra is finally sleeping through the night!
So, how did we accomplish this? Sierra has had terrible sleep habits since she was around 10 weeks old, mainly due to mistakes made by me (consistently nursing her to sleep being the biggest one). She needed a lot of help falling asleep and woke up several times throughout the night, always needing to be nursed to get back to sleep.
The first thing we did was work to break her of the nurse-to-sleep association at bedtime. Lex shouldered most of the work on this one, in part because Sierra absolutely freaked out if she saw me and I didn’t feed her, but also because I’m a total sucker and I was too likely to give in to her. I began nursing her just before bedtime instead of at bedtime, and then Lex took over. He patiently took a lot of protest and even some abuse while rocking her, holding her, walking with her – whatever it took until she gave in and went to sleep. Over the course of several weeks, she stopped fighting him so hard, she began falling asleep in the crib while he’d pat her on the back instead of holding her, and then (!!!) she even started asking to be put in the crib on her own. Bedtime went from taking 30 minutes or more to under 5 (after her books and songs). Soon I was able to put her to sleep as well.
So, bedtime became a lot easier, but staying asleep was a whole other issue. Sierra would wake up between 2 and 5 times a night, and though Lex might be able to get her back to sleep the first time, she usually ended up in our bed to nurse and then would nurse on and off the rest of the night. Part of what contributed to her frequent night wakings (aside from habit) is that Sierra is a very light sleeper and even quiet noises would wake her up – and with no self-soothing ability, she would immediately cry for us. We might be able to get her back to sleep and in the crib, but between the creaky floorboards or the sound of the doorknob turning, we would often wake her up again as we tried to leave the room.
Over the past several months I’ve taken quite a few sleep books out from the library. I’ve been looking for any alternative to cry-it-out methods, though it’s hard to find books that don’t spout some variation. I know we let Anya cry, and I never felt good about it. I could see how Sierra’s sleep issues were very much due to things I did or didn’t do when she was younger, and I didn’t feel that she should then be “punished” because of the mistakes I made. I dutifully read The No-Cry Sleep Solution but didn’t feel that Pantley’s methods would work for Sierra. I also perused Dr. Ferber’s book and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, but they are both tradition CIO books, and so I wasn’t interested.
The most recent time I was at the library, I decided I would give No-Cry another go, but while I was getting it off the shelf I noticed another book, The SleepEasy Solution. It looked interesting and boasted a “least-cry” approach, so I figured it was worth reading. Well, when it comes down to it, the book really is another CIO book, but before the authors get to that part, they devote a lot of time to discussing changes to make to the baby’s bedtime routine and sleep environment. One of their big suggestions was to play continuous white noise in the room – something we used to do when she was an infant. There are lots of fancy machines out there, but white noise doesn’t need to be expensive. I looked in the iTunes store and narrowed down the choices to a few options, but then we ended up buying a white noise application for the iPhone/iPod Touch since the clock in her room as an iPod dock.
BEST 99 CENTS WE EVER SPENT!
The white noise had an immediate effect on bedtime – we were able to get out of the room without waking her up! Then we saw that Lex was able to get her back to sleep in the middle of the night more easily. She started waking up less often until she was only waking up once, and then one night she slept from bedtime until 5 am completely on her own. That was the point when we (er, Lex) insisted that Sierra was ready to learn to go to sleep on her own.
The first night, she cried for 14 minutes before lying down to go to sleep, but it wasn’t the hysterical, gasping for air cry she had done in the past. It was more of a “HEY, WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU AREN’T GOING TO STAY WITH ME?” cry. It still broke my heart, but I could see the difference, and that was the first time she EVER voluntarily went from standing to lying down in the crib. The next night it took 6 minutes of intermittent cries, the third under a minute, the fourth about 6 seconds, and tonight – NOTHING. The first few nights she woke up once or twice in the middle of the night but went back to sleep without help, and then came into our bed between 5 and 5:30 am to nurse and cuddle. Last night she slept from 7:30 pm until 6:20 am. SO AWESOME. I got seven straight hours of sleep. It’s been WAY too long since I got that much sleep. Naps have been improving, too. I had decided that I did not want to follow the book’s advice about letting her cry to nap and would continue helping her sleep, but then starting yesterday she’s been able to fall asleep on her own during the day, too! We’ve still got some work to do to help her extend her naps, but things are so much better than they were even just last week.
Sierra, I am sorry it took us so long to teach you how to sleep! I hope you are enjoying the extra rest as much as we are.
Birthday Videos
Oops, I never posted videos from Anya’s third birthday back in October and Sierra’s first birthday in December!
Anya’s birthday video:
Singing “Happy Birthday” to Sierra:
Sierra eats her cake: