Thursday, September 25, 2014

29 Weeks

This week's post is subtitled "Audra, slow it down!"

So as I mentioned in last week's post, Audra started sitting up on Wednesday. On Thursday, she started standing. On Friday, we noticed her first two teeth just below her gums, and on Saturday, she cut her first tooth. She has had a busy week :)

Within a couple of days of starting to sit, Audra even stopped using her arms for support and sat straight up on her own. The problem with that is she then topples over, and our floor is not very forgiving :( Even when we try to catch her, she still slips by enough times that she has learned she definitely does not like conking her head on the floor, which invariably leads to full-on screaming now. And now she'll scream even when we catch her or she just falls over without hitting anything, since I guess just the sensation of falling reminds her how much she doesn't like it. Audra is SO LOUD when she's upset (ok, when she's happy too!), so this has been a very scream-y week for her, between the falling over and cutting teeth, Ryan went in to get her when she woke once last week when I was in the shower, and since she goes 0-60 very quickly, she was already worked up by time he got there... and he said when he opened the door, the volume and intensity of her screaming literally took his breath away. So yeah. That's fun.

I was supposed to have one of my biweekly Josie/Mommy days last Saturday too, which was an especially scream-y day, so I ended up sending Ryan out with Josie instead while I stayed home with Audra. She did just fine, and I started having the sneaking suspicion that I'd been played....
So yeah, apparently Audra's "down-dog" moves that so confounded me last week were actually just prep for her to start standing up, since instead of just doing down-dog off the floor, she started doing it with her hands on her bouncy chair, then graduated to pushing herself to standing using her bookshelf, stools, Ryan, play tables, etc. She even tried standing on her own, which didn't go so well - she stood straight up and then just continued on over, but at least she was on the bed when she tried that.
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And finally, Audra's bottom two teeth are coming through now. It seemed like she was a pretty stealthy teether at first, since there was no noticeable increase in her gnawing on anything, drooling, or fussiness, but the fussiness kicked in over the weekend as the teeth actually started coming through. She also got quite upset with me when I took a book away that she was in the process of mangling - not that I want her to be fussy, but this was still sort of exciting, since she's starting to make her preferences known for "wants" rather than just "needs". It seems she really is liking being able to get herself around now, and she's starting to explore her world more and more: she pushed herself to sitting the other day, crawled over to her bookshelf and then systematically cleared it out before using it to stand up. Given her lack of mobility even a few weeks ago, this is pretty amazing.
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Audra has started having conversations with us, as she'll grunt to get the conversation started and then will continue to grunt in response to our grunts :) She also partook in what may possibly be a new weekend tradition of pancakes for breakfast, assuming I can keep this going. We're just having banana pancakes for now, until I can start having dairy again, but Audra (and Josie) seemed fine with them regardless :) She has gotten a lot better at actually getting food to her mouth, and seemed to especially like hummus and pita chips for this week.
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For sleep this week, she mostly woke many times at night, I continued to be frustrated (but at least just mildly, this week!) that I can't even shift to my back to sleep some nights without waking her up, blah, blah, blah. Same story, different week :) So the silver lining for this week is that she had one particularly good night, where she slept a FIVE HOUR stretch (possibly the longest she's slept since I went back to work?), then followed by a couple of two-hour stretches, which is unusual - normally if she has a long stretch of sleep she wakes every hour after that for the rest of the night. Also, I've decided she needs to read the same baby sleep books as I am (current "Sweet Sleep", which La Leche League put out - this is providing some much-needed affirmation that Audra's sleep patterns right now are perfectly normal from a physiological perspective, and bedsharing is not a bad thing and can be quite beneficial to her and our relationship). Anyway, so one of the nice things about bedsharing is supposed to be waking up to your baby's bright happy smile in the morning... however, Audra chose to wake me up the other day by using my arm to make some very rude noises and then tried to eat my nose and chin. :)

Miscellaneous cuteness:
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[Audra's Italian is showing through]
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[Now I have two kids who are intrigued by my shoes]
[Screeching]

Wednesday, September 17, 2014

28 Weeks

Audra went in for her 6-month well baby appointment last week, where she was happy as could be and didn't even cry for her shots :) She measured in at 22lbs, 29" long, with a head circumference of 16 3/4" (so off the charts for weight and length still, and 50-75th percentile for her head). Her doctor seemed impressed with Audra's fine and gross motor skills... and that was even before Audra's latest progress :) So she's technically done with doctors and shots for 3 months (we only got half of her 6-mo shots this week, but her doctor said it was fine to just get the rest at her 9-mo appointment rather than making a separate appointment in a couple of weeks), but we will probably have to bring her in sooner than that anyway for her flu shot. She did great after this round of shots too, with just some warmth and swelling at the injection site for a couple of days.

Audra is doing the "classic" crawl more now, although she tends to drop down to her belly to army crawl when she gets close to her target. There is still lots of rocking back and forth, which was fairly terrifying when she did it towards me, inches from my face, with her mouth wide open to grab my nose ;)
After lots of frankly confusing moves on her part, she has also started to push herself up to sitting too! Although, up until this morning, she wasn't too great at staying upright once she got there. But daycare sent me this picture this morning, so it looks like Audra has figured things out now ;)
But before that, she was doing lots of downward-facing dog moves (for those of you who don't do yoga, basically her knees were off the ground and her bum was in the air). She is pretty happy most of the time when we set her down on the floor - she usually heads right for her favorite things (lately, Josie or the doorstop), and she's super excited about things in general.
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I'm still restricting my diet for probably a few more months, although I'm cautiously starting to test some foods out again. After several times of testing it, I've sadly come to the conclusion that I still can't eat peanut butter yet, but I did try tomatoes several times this week and it appears that those are ok now, which is helpful (tomatoes are in a lot of things, as it turns out). Although I normally tell if a food is ok for me to eat based on how Audra sleeps that night (if she's up a lot with gas, that's a bad sign), but it was sort of hard to tell since she slept so horrendously this week anyway. But I did have tomatoes twice yesterday and she actually did relatively well last night, so I'm considering that my confirmation that tomatoes are fine again ;)

Audra is coming down with a cold again, but I don't even feel like I can really blame that for her sleep. I'm finally admitting to myself that her waking every 1-2 hours most (if not all) of the night is not a phase that's going to be short-lived, unfortunately. She did have an over 4-hour stretch last night (which was then followed by a couple of hours of nursing off and on before she finally settled back into some good sleep somewhere around 4am), but beyond that, it's been a pretty rough week. I am still functioning better than I think I have any right to with this long of a stretch of interrupted sleep, but my patience is not really at the level that I'd like it to be. The silver linings for this week are that Audra woke for the day between 5:30 and 6:30am each morning (much better than 4:30!), and she fell back asleep on her own a few times, including a couple of times on her belly. I wasn't going to push belly sleeping until she was ready due to the SIDS risk, but she rolled herself over last week and fell asleep, so I let her be. I had been hoping that that would help her sleep longer, as it can sometimes do for other babies, but alas. Not our baby ;) She also slept on her side facing me once, which she doesn't normally do, and although I couldn't get back to sleep before the alarm, I did at least get to enjoy about 20 minutes of watching her sleep with her sweet little hands resting on my face.

We'll have to see if this pattern persists too, but Audra possibly skipped right over the 2-nap stage that I vaguely remember lasting from about age 6 months to one year, since she only took one nap a day over the weekend and actually seemed pretty ok with it. She had been doing a morning nap around 8 or 9am and then an afternoon nap around 1pm, with an occasion catnap around 4pm. But this weekend, she fought going to sleep at the usual times and instead just took a nap starting around 10am, and then was only moderately fussy in the afternoons (but did take a couple catnaps Sunday afternoon).

Audra is pretty into this whole solid foods thing. Giving her some rice has proven to be an effective form of entertainment for her while we're out to eat, and while she mainly just pushed that around and inspected it rather than eating it, she did actually ingest some food yesterday! We gave her some beef and peppers, and everything went immediately into her mouth this time for her to suck on, gum, spit out, then gum on it some more.
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Nursing is still going fine for the most part, since while I'm pretty relaxed about feeding her in general (she still nurses on demand on the weekends, and I'm not worrying about how much she's taking in or how frequently), I am more stressed about my supply. She is still taking in about 16oz at daycare, and now with her nursing so frequently overnight, I'm cutting it much closer with how much I'm able to pump during the day, and I'm no longer able to freeze the 10oz or so every week that I was able to before. In fact, I've only been able to freeze less than 5oz total in the last month and a half, which isn't great, especially since I had to thaw some a couple of times when I didn't pump enough during the day and I've had to replenish the frozen stash at daycare a few times.

I'm still pumping every two hours at work to try to keep up with Audra, but it does make me pretty nervous to be cutting it this close, and I worry that my freezer stash is going to be depleted before she's a year old. It's at about 100oz right now, which is pretty low compared to the 400oz I had frozen for Josie at this age, although the intention for Josie was to be able to work through the frozen stash after I weaned. With Audra, I'm just trying to get through her first year until she can start on cow's milk instead, but the frozen stash will be less important then since I'm not really planning on fully weaning her too soon after that point. I also just realized that I may have hurt my supply inadvertently, though - due to how frequently Audra wakes overnight, I've just been nursing her on the same side for half the night and then switching to the other side for the second half of the night so it was less disruptive to us both.... which I just realized looks suspiciously like block feeding, which is a method to slow milk production. So now I'm trying to switch sides more often, so hopefully things will start picking up again over the next week or two.

Miscellaneous cuteness:
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[I forgot to pack a spare set of clothes for her in the diaper bag, so this is how she looks in size 4T ;)]
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Monday, September 15, 2014

August

Last month, Josie discovered what may be her new favorite place: the library. As one of our Mommy/Josie outings, we went to the library to read until it closed, then went to a pet store to look at the animals, and then picked up dinner to bring back home to Ryan and Audra. I told Josie to go ahead and pick out some books once we got to the kids' section at the library, and maybe she just thought it was too good to be true so she felt the need to act with some immediacy, but she probably needs to work on her strategy. She basically tried to clear out whole shelves at a time... of baby books. I ended up taking over the book selection role so that we could read books more appropriate for her age level, and then she picked out some books to check out and bring home, which was almost more than she could handle.
[Josie with her books that she didn't want to let leave her sight]

She also really liked looking at the animals at the pet store, too, although she did decide she was scared of the fish (possibly because I told her that she would scare them by knocking on the glass). We went out to pick up burgers, and her meal came with a soda so I gave her maybe a couple of inches of sparkling flavored water, which she was super excited about... at least until she tasted it. She kept saying, "It's soda! It's spicy!" and seemed pained to be drinking it, yet still finished it, announced she didn't like soda, then decided five minutes later that she actually did like it :)

For our second Mommy/Josie outing for August, we rode on the "train" (on the new Metro line that recently opened somewhat near our house) and went to the mall for some ice cream. Besides some stress on my part (all the construction by the new station was a little confusing, and it turns out I still don't like the mall), Josie was super excited about riding the train (although she put in a request for a black one the next time, instead of white) and eating some black cherry frozen yogurt (picked entirely based on color, since it was pink). Josie apparently really appreciated the frozen yogurt, because as I was trying to navigate her down three floors at the mall, through the Saturday afternoon hordes of people, she grabbed my leg and told me how much she loved me :) So sweet, until she did the same thing to Ryan the next day when she happened to have frozen yogurt again, so maybe it's really just the frozen yogurt that she loves so much ;)
[We're on a bridge!!]

Josie's other big outing for the month was finally going to the National Zoo. She went with Ryan to work in the morning (where she apparently ate quite the hearty breakfast, with seconds and thirds of fruit), and then they headed out to the zoo for his company picnic. She had a lot of fun seeing the big cats and monkeys, and, of course, naked mole rats. And then when I got home from work, I asked her how the zoo was, and she said "Frozen!" Which apparently was short-hand for "I can't talk right now, I'm watching Frozen. Again." Oh, well.

Josie had a rather unfortunate milestone this month: after transitioning her out of her crib almost a year ago, she fell out of bed for the first time... followed a couple of weeks later by the second time. It was a little odd, though, since Ryan and I asked her how she fell, and she kept saying over the bed rail - which seems unlikely since it sticks up from her bed by a good foot. But as far as we can piece together, she was leaning over her bed rail to get a drink of water, and then must have just fallen over it... and then laid there, sadly crying on the floor until Ryan went in to get her ;( Then she went over the foot of the bed a couple weeks later (so over the rolled-up towels that are there as a bumper), and similarly laid on the floor crying until I went in to get her.

As Josie's language skills improve, she increases in funniness too ;) Here are some snippets of conversation from the indelible Miss Josie:
  • She asked if the library was closed, and I said yes, so she said "And still?" repeatedly for maybe over a minute, with no feedback evidently needed from me. I was in the other room when I noticed it was suddenly quiet, so I finally answered with "yeah", and she sadly said "oh." 
  • She said ""Get out of my seat, buddy!" as she was getting in her car seat, then claimed Ana said that in Frozen (is this true? Neither Ryan nor I remember that part if so...).
  • She asked where the horn was in my car, then insisted it was on my stereo. I kept telling her no, she kept telling me yes, then eventually she said "You'll just have to trust me."
  • When I asked her what the name was of the book she had chosen, she said "Go to sleep, Rabbit!" I thought that was a good interpretation of "Goodnight Moon." ;)
  • She asked to sleep in bed with all of us, but Ryan told her there wasn't enough room, so she listed off everyone who would fit (all of us plus Ryan two more times). Ryan said again that not everyone would fit, so she offered to lay on him instead.
  • She yelled "I have to show you a question!", then launched into a long list of activities she needed to do in order to find her lost rubber duck. Nothing was shown to or asked of me in this exchange.
  • As she watched me bag up some blueberries to take to work, she told me she was going to take blueberries to work too when she was "bigger, bigger, bigger and work at [redacted] like Daddy." That sounded like a good plan to me!
  • I passed her and Ryan on the road as she was driving her tractor, so I asked her where she was going, and she responded "I'm going to the grocery store to buy a watermelon." :)
Josie has also really been into matching lately, yelling "This is the same!!" to many things that don't necessarily seem the same at first, like Audra's swaddler and my shoes (linking feature: both were pink). She is also completely out of diapers now - we were continuing with diapers overnight until we ran out of the stockpile we had built up, but Josie asked to not wear them before that happened, so here we are. She's doing fine overnight and with naps, although she still has the rare accident during the day (strangely enough, mainly just at home though).

After a few too many nights of heavy negotiations, we ended up rearranging her books for bedtime reading, so now we have the "two book shelf" for the shorter ones, and the "one book shelf" for the longer books, to make it easier on her (and us) to determine if she gets to read one or two books before bed. But either way, books as a whole take longer to read to her now, since she asks so many questions about everything, and often has us flip back a few pages so she can ask follow-up questions or point out something that matched.

Ryan also asks her to tell him a story all the time, and Josie actually obliged for the first time! Exciting, until her story was basically about various times she cried at school :( Poor thing does still cry quite a bit, but the rest of the time (even when stuck home for days on end with a cold and potentially pinkeye like last month) she's such a silly, funny, affectionate kid.
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[I feel like I get this face from her a lot - I think this was her "angry" face]
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[Scared!]
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[Happy!]

The relationship between Josie and Audra continues to be such an awesome thing to see develop. I had no expectations going into this about the relationship between the two kids, and just hoped that Josie wouldn't try to aim for Audra's soft spot when we weren't looking. So seeing how much enjoyment they seem to get from each other is just great :)
And while it seemed it would maybe be a bit one-sided, since Audra clearly thinks Josie is the greatest while Josie wasn't quite as sure about Audra at first, Josie now needs to know where Audra is at all times, asks about her when they're apart, and often tries to speak for Audra to Ryan or me. She asks to wake Audra up to play, and then actually does play with her when she's awake. Audra started to get a bit fussy in her bouncy seat one morning as I was getting breakfast ready, and Josie came running up, saying "What do you want to play with, Audra?" and proceeded to pull everything out of her purse to show Audra (and put on her head), which quickly brought an end to the fussing :) She also played with cars and her O-ball with Audra, and while Josie does still get a little possessive about some of her toys and books, she usually comes around as soon as we ask her to show Audra how they work or to read to her. And the affection Josie shows to Audra is so sweet - she'll sometimes stroke Audra's hair as I'm nursing her, and often she'll open the door to peek in on us as I'm putting Audra down at night. One time she saw I was up so she came right in, climbed on the bed, and started loving on Audra, who was quite thrilled with that turn of events - much better than sleep! :)

Miscellaneous cuteness:
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[That's not quite how it works...]
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[Thumb!]
[Trying out some virtual reality]

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

27 Weeks

Well, I was hoping it would be a little more clear-cut, but we're going to go ahead and call it anyway: we have a crawler :) While Audra is not motoring around with hands and feet working in coordination quite yet, she definitely is moving both her hands and feet now - and even doing a few little frog hops - so I think that's close enough :)
Audra is also babbling a lot more now too. Putting her down to bed has gotten even more difficult, since now, just as she's drifting off to sleep, she'll suddenly pop up again with a string of "bla bla blas", along with her compulsive need to get on her hands and knees and rock back and forth. We have little conversations of babbling at each other, and I think I may have surprised her a bit with how excited I got when I said "aaah bla" to her, and she responded with a very clearly enunciated "aaaaah BLA!" Too cute.
And if that weren't already enough, we met our preliminary goal of exclusively breastfeeding for her first six months, so we started introducing solids this week. We're doing the Baby-Led Weaning method again, so we'll just be starting out with giving her fruits and vegetables and whatever she's able to grab from our plates for her to feed herself with. The actual ingestion of the food is less important than the experimentation at this point, which was a good point to keep in mind since Day One of solids was a bit anti-climactic: after everything she can get her hands on making an immediate beeline for her mouth for weeks, we expected the same once we gave her some food. But instead, it was like a little switch flipped with her, as she went "ooooh, food" and proceeded to squish it between her fingers instead, with only the bits stuck to her thumb when she took a thumb-sucking break actually making it in her mouth :)
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So bananas and avocados were mostly just squished, although she has gnawed on an apple a couple of times since then too. She loved sharing an apple with me (although I have to admit I didn't really eat it after she left copious amounts of drool all over it during her turn), holding onto my hand with hers as she gnawed away on it, pulling away to make a face and then attacking it again with a grin :) She did actually break little tiny pieces off of the apple and then proceeded to gag it all right back out, so I'm not sure that she has actually swallowed any food yet, but that's just all part of the learning process right now.
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Audra appears to be in a "stranger anxiety" phase, which unfortunately seems to include anyone she just hasn't seen in a few weeks. She cried for Ryan's parents when she saw them for the first time in almost a month (before smiling and babbling for them later), she was on the borderline of smiling and sad crying for my mom at first (who she had seen just two weeks prior), and she apparently gets quite upset by anyone outside of the core group of caretakers at daycare. She has been a bit clingy lately, and is still getting very upset whenever we walk out of the room. So while she's usually quick to laugh and smile still, she's also equally quick to flip that switch. All of this is sort of unsurprising to me, though, as she is going through all of these other big changes, and we're her safe, stable place... so while it's not always possible or all that convenient, we're trying to just hold her more in hopes that will help ease this phase for her.

We're back to Audra waking about every 1-2 hours overnight again, although the silver lining for this week is that she was actually able to get herself back to sleep on her own a few times overnight after just a minute or two of fussing. As I mentioned above, getting her down to sleep for naps and nighttime is more difficult now, since she's not falling right to sleep while nursing and will often pop off and on a bunch of times. I usually cut her off when she does that so she doesn't get a belly full of air, but then she just gets really upset since she's usually already overtired now since she's having more troubles sleeping. It's a bit of a vicious cycle.

I also tend to go through cycles concerning Audra's sleep, from fighting it and getting really frustrated with the situation, to accepting that it is what it is and will pass soon enough, to even cherishing the extra time and contact we have overnight. Unfortunately, I'm in the "fighting it" stage at the moment, although since I've been feeling a bit defeated lately, hopefully acceptance is just around the corner ;) I'm also trying to get as much sleep in as I can, so I've just been going to bed with Audra a few times a week around 7pm, which somewhat helps, although I've had a few nights recently when I just couldn't get to sleep, which pretty much defeats the purpose of going to bed early.

Anyway, it has continued to be so neat to watch the relationship between Josie and Audra. Audra just lights up whenever she sees Josie, and her daycare provider even commented on it, since Josie went with Audra to daycare when her school was closed for a day last week . Apparently Audra does react much differently to Josie than the other kids, and would just smile and laugh at her even when Josie wasn't doing anything :) Josie was even able to calm Audra down one evening this weekend - it was the end of a long day of fighting naps, so Audra was an overtired mess as we were trying to eat dinner. Josie kept trying to play with her and entertain her, and eventually her persistence paid off - Audra stopped crying and even started smiling. Ryan and I weren't even able to make the slightest difference in calming her down, so this was pretty amazing to see.

Miscellaneous cuteness:
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[What daycare calls "The Pose"]

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

26 Weeks

Audra was on a mission this week, and although she didn't accomplish her goal quite yet, it's only a matter of time :) This little baby is bound and determined to be crawling ASAP, which is kind of scary/thrilling for Ryan and me - as I think I've mentioned before, Josie was not particularly mobile as a baby (and never really crawled, just started scooted around 11 months), so this is new territory for us. But Audra is now up on her hands and knees and rocking back and forth, and starting to bring her knees forward. As soon as she gets her arms to cooperate, she's going to be all over the place.
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[Getting some ground clearance]
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All of this excitement has taken its toll on her sleeping, though. Poor thing is now rolling over the second she starts waking up, so there have been several instances of her sad crying, as she seems a little bewildered about how she was just sleeping and yet suddenly she's on her hands and knees again. Her naps have also been hit or miss - she skipped her morning nap on Saturday, but took a good 2.5-hour nap in the afternoon, and then skipped her late afternoon nap. Then on Sunday, she only napped for 15 minutes in the morning, maybe 5 minutes in the car seat, and then nothing until she passed out in the carrier for half an hour in the afternoon after some rough crying. She had been super fussy that whole afternoon, so I kept trying to nurse her down, but it seems like she was just too excited to sleep - the second nursing took the edge off, she would just roll back and forth, up on her knees and down again, with a huge grin on her face... at least until her glee wore off enough that she would start fussing again.

Perhaps needless to say, Ryan and I are exhausted. Audra too, probably. Ryan is still trying to recover from his nasty cold (going on three weeks now), and while I'm the healthiest one of the family at the moment, I'm pretty worn down by lack of sleep. I bank on being able to nap during Audra's naps on the weekend to help me recover a bit, and I didn't get nearly enough sleep this weekend. And then her overnight sleep is still rough - the winner for the week is tied between last night, when she woke four times and got us up for the day early with a poo blowout, but managed a 4.5-hour(!!) stretch in the middle of the night, or the night before, when she only woke three times and did a 3-hour stretch in the middle... but then nursed the entire night besides that.

On a related note, I finished setting up Audra's room and we've now decamped to her room. She's stretching out more at night, so I just didn't feel comfortable trying to comfortably fit all three of us in our bed, and now that she's rolling more, I wanted to hem her in a bit more and make it safer for her than our previous arrangement was. So now Audra and I are sleeping on a futon in her room, with the plan to move her back into her crib for at least the first stretch of the night once she starts sleeping better again. It just seems pointless to try her crib now, since I'd have to wait until she's sleeping deeply enough that I could move her, and then she still usually wakes every half hour anyway.
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While I do love sharing sleep with Audra (when she actually sleeps!), moving out of my bedroom/away from Ryan is hitting me a bit hard. I'm doing what I think is best for Audra to get enough sleep (and me, too), and this is just a temporary situation, but it's still getting me down. Ryan and I talked this weekend about sleep training her, and while I certainly think about it on occasion, it's still just not the right decision for us as a family... and even if we did feel comfortable with it, I'm not convinced it would work for Audra, at least not yet. Maybe we'll revisit this after she's a year old, but for now, we'll stay the course and hold onto the likelihood that most of her sleep problems will naturally resolve if given enough time.

On a happier note, the baby that was so stingy with her laughs at first has decided just about everything is quite hilarious now :) I was holding Audra as Josie ran back and forth in her room picking out clothes, and given that Audra normally laughs on an inhale, I was afraid she was going to pass out from all the laughing she was doing each time Josie ran by :) She also laughed a couple of times when she saw Ryan strapping on the carrier (which she likes more now that she spends most of the time patting Ryan's face and trying to grab his headphones), and even laughed at poor Josie as she was having a bit of a meltdown.
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[Saying hey to Mirror Baby/Daddy]

Audra also worked Ryan to the point of exhaustion when we went out to eat last weekend, as he attempted to keep her from eating anything she could get her hands on - although she did manage to eat part of a napkin holder (sigh), we were able to keep everything else out of her belly. But it wasn't from lack of trying on her end - with single-minded focus, she was grabbing and lunging at our drinks, plates, silverware, everything. At one point, she was laying almost entirely across the table, scrabbling and trying to grab my plate, with such a serious expression on her face that I just had to laugh (after trying to save my plate, of course!). It's probably none too soon that we're going to start introducing solids next week - hopefully she'll be able to handle sitting in high chairs at restaurants soon too, to try to help contain her :)

Miscellaneous cuteness:
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[Spending quality time in her playard... in our closet, naturally]
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Series of silly expressions:
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