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.

[Getting some ground clearance]

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.

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.

[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:

[Spending quality time in her playard... in our closet, naturally]

Series of silly expressions: