Staceytown: 32 Weeks

Josie knows how to celebrate holidays right: much like the two weeks she spent either at home or with family around Christmas and New Year's, she got to spend Valentine's Day home with Ryan and me :) This time it was because of croup - or, at least, what we assume was croup. She seemed perfectly fine during the day, but had a low grade fever and a barking cough at night, so we decided to keep her out of daycare last Tuesday (with us) and Wednesday (with Ryan's parents) in case she was contagious and so we could keep an eye on her, rather than bringing her to the doctor when she didn't seem that sick, since she would probably pick up something worse there. So instead she spent most of the day sleeping on us, and helping us work:

[Assisting Ryan with his video conference]

[Josie's first foray into typing, just before also opening her first application (WinZip)]

This week also brought home just how much Miss Josie is growing. I have been having problems carrying her in her car seat lately, with my elbow starting to hurt and walking getting more difficult after being weighed down so much. So this weekend we took the plunge and switched out the infant car seat with convertible car seats. So now instead of putting her in the removable car seat and just popping that into and out of the bases in each of our cars (which was quite convenient when she was asleep, but again, I could barely carry her anymore), she has a car seat that stays in each car, which will be more of a pain in some ways, but we also didn't have much choice, seeing as how she had just about outgrown her infant seat anyway.

This weekend I also pulled out more of her 12-month outfits, as she's outgrowing more and more of her 6-9 month clothes. And the biggest problem may be that she's outgrowing her swing: it has a 25-pound weight limit, so she still has about 3 pounds to go (but who's counting), but that thing creaks so much while she's in it now, and if/when she starts kicking, it sounds like the whole thing is just going to fall apart. So we should pack that away too, but after she put herself to sleep in it and took a solid 2-hour nap this weekend, I'm not quite ready to give that up quite yet.

And now we came to my favorite (or least favorite, depending on how you look at it) topic: sleep. After Josie fell asleep within 10 minutes one night last week (normally she nurses for close to an hour before falling asleep), I left her in bed since I figured I would just have to nurse her again soon enough... and then when she did wake up 30 minutes later and nursed for only 10 minutes again before falling back asleep, I left her in bed again. And then when she didn't wake up again until 2:30am (when normally she's been waking up upset between 9-10pm), I realized we might be on to something. So although we hadn't really planned on bed-sharing (more than we had been, at least), it looks like that's exactly what we'll be doing at least until she's feeling better (since a combination of teething and coughing seems to be waking her up more frequently than we'd all prefer), since it turns out at least Ryan and I like getting more sleep than we have been. One of my big hang-ups had been that I wasn't able to sleep as well with Josie in bed with us, but then it turns out that I sleep just fine with her between me and the edge of the bed - with Josie's fondness for sleeping with her arms outstretched, I just couldn't sleep well with her between Ryan and me since her little hands were always in danger of getting rolled over on. So now we have a bed rail on my side, even though she has yet to move away from me during the night - instead, she apparently sleeps the best at an optimal maximum distance from me of approximately 4 inches, as I learned through trial and error the other night when she was a little too far away from me and about to wake up, but settled right down once I snuggled her up next to me :)

We know we'll just have to move her back into her crib again at some point, because, as I've heard it explained, you have to pay the piper sometime... we're just choosing to pay later (much like we'll have to do with her thumb sucking, I'm sure), since at this point, we're still not comfortable with sleep training and/or any of the various permutations of crying it out. Instead, this seems to be her training wheels for sleep - she had been having troubles getting herself settled down lately and I was worried about nursing being her crutch since that is the only (almost) guaranteed way to get her back to sleep when she gets worked up overnight, so bed-sharing actually seems a bit better from my perspective, since she's able to settle herself back down the majority of the time now with no help from me beyond just being there. And Ryan's only issue with this arrangement is that Josie sometimes wakes him up since she likes to pat him on the back, face, eyeball, etc., while she's nursing between us. So we'll see. We keep evolving and adjusting things as she grows and develops, so maybe this week of being down to a glorious two night wakeups will just be a fluke and we'll be onto trying something else next week.

Anyway, other fun stuff from the week is Josie now has started doing the "s" sound, and after a game of fake laughing back and forth at each other, we're pretty sure she said "mama" (apropos to nothing, and we realize it doesn't count quite yet). She also mimicked me, which was pretty exciting - usually our mimicry game only occurs when she initiates, but I tried saying "bababa" to her this week, and she immediately "bababa"-ed right back at me :)

[Fake laughing conversation]

Josie's attention span also seems to have increased tremendously. She hung out on a blanket playing with toys at Ryan's parents' house last week for over an hour, I believe, and this weekend, spent probably about 30 minutes doing this:

Which led to Ryan making this face at her, despite her being quite pleased with herself for giving the afghan the what for: