Life:
I'm writing this really late this week (it's Sunday night) but it's been a busy week. Besides having Chris in town for the weekend (more on that a little later), Harmony and I have also been out to my cousin Kathleen's 2nd birthday party. During the week, we went to our regular programs at school. I got so mcuh done on Monday! I finished 3 of the key questions to send in, which means I'm half done unit 1. I've given myself 2 weeks to do each unit, since I most likely only have until August to finish the correspondance course. The main topic of this week's journal...? SLEEP!
Yikes! I've been getting ready for it for a while now, settling Harmony into a routine, ect. but it's just so different going through with it! It was so hard listening to Harmony cry herself to sleep, but We started on Thursday night and I did what I had to and went in and checked on her every few minutes, giving her her soother back, telling her I loved her and that everything was ok. She actually did pretty well and settled herself off to sleep after about 40 minutes. I really hated to do it, I wish there was another way, but I just can't tolerate her need to nurse to sleep any more and more importantly, I want to be able to give her the skills to settle herself off to sleep so that she wont always need me around!!! For almost her whole life, she's needed to (at least!) nurse to settle herself off to sleep. There were even times when she needed to be rocked to sleep in her swing, and there was the couple weeks when she needed to be nursed to sleep in my bed and then moved after being asleep, but at least those habits were easier to break. Nursing off to sleep will be a little bit harder because it's her main sleep assosiation. In the past, nursing her off to sleep meant that if she woke up right after I put her to in her crib (sound asleep!), she cried until I gave her her boob back! So it's no wonder this is a negative sleep assosiation to have! I've done a lot of research on sleep patterns, and I've decided that now is the perfect time to do it. She's almost 6 months old, so she's old enough to be able to learn to settle herself off to sleep, and old enough to go through the night and yet she's too young to pull herself to sitting, standing, and all that other stuff you have to deal with when teaching your older child to sleep on his/her own. If you think about it, they have to learn to get themselves to sleep at some point. I will not be nursing Harmony to sleep when she is 8 years old!!! So I'd rather be doing this now when she is still fairly impressionable and will learn quickly, than when she is a stubborn toddler who needs to be held and soothed to go to sleep.
Alot of people have different views on this subject. At first, I thought to myself that I could never ever let my child cry. And for the first 6 months of her life, Harmony really hasn't ever cried for lengthy periods of time. That 40 minutes was probably the longest she's ever cried in one stretch. I've always been attentive to her needs, quickly assessing what needed to be done and doing it. However, it used to be that her crying was always for needs. Now at night she cries because she wants to nurse. Often, she isn't hungry- she has simply woken up in the middle of the night for some reason and wants her usual "comfort tool" to help herself back to sleep. This is negative for so many reasons, and these are the reasons I'm trying this self-settling technique...
#1- I will, at some point, need to wean Harmony from nursing herself to sleep. True, some children do wean themselves, but that seems unlikely. Since I have to do it eventually, I might as well do it now. The habit will be harder to break when Harmony is 18 months old and whining to go to bed with her bottle. I know of some older toddlers that go to bed with bottles because they have become so used to sucking themselves off to sleep (with food involved, since a soother won't do...). This is an ever worse habit to have because going to bed with a bottle can cause ear infections and tooth decay.
#2- Another good reason to teaching "self-settling" at 6 months as opposed to 2 years (or even 9 months!) is that Harmony can't sit or stand up in her crib, or get out of bed and run out of her room or pound on the door!
#3- Another reason I'm trying to get Harmony to settle herself is, I admit, a selfish one. I am started to lose patience with having to help Harmony settle herself to sleep. There's nothing more frustrated than carefully laying a peacefully sleeping baby in her crib and having her wake up the very second you do, screaming her head off! Then, having that pattern repeat itself, sometimes several times before the "real" bedtime, and several times a week, is enough to make anyone lose their minds. I'm a fan of routine, organization, and being able to go through the bedtime routine, and have your child fall asleep right away because they understand that when they're tired and it's bedtime, they can just fall asleep, would be just heaven!
Our routine this week has been a little disrupted, but hopefully that wont interfere too much with the new sleeping conditioning. I was hoping to choose a better time to do it, but all of a sudden, on Thursday night, I found myself unable to deal with the baby anymore. It had been a long week, and I was tired, angry, and very frustrated! Harmony had been changed, fed, burped, cuddled, rocked, everything and was still fighting sleep. So I decided that since I had been planning on trying the new sleep technique anyways, that there was "no time like the present!" So Thursday night was the first night and she settled herself after 40 minutes. On Friday night, Harmony fell asleep in the car on the way home from Kathleen's birthday party, and I didn't have the heart to wake her just to have her cry herself to sleep. On Saturday night, she was at my aunt's house, and I'm not sure if she cried herself to sleep, but she slept from 8 pm to 7:30 am!!! I'm so jealous- why doens't she ever do anything like that for me??? Tonight went really well, Harmony only cried herself to sleep for about 10 minutes. Hopefully she'll sleep through until at least 5 (I've got my fingers crossed). So that's the sleep update this week, I'll continue next week.
So, about my weekend with Chris. Well, I guess it's gone ok. Harmony went to stay overnight at my aunt's house on Saturday so Chris and I got to go out to dinner with some of our friends and got to go to a movie and spend lots of time together. Today we went on a family outing and took Harmony for her very first swim!!! We went to the Splash Wave pool right next to my old high school, but stayed on the kiddie pool side with the warmer water. Despite the warm water, I was half prepared to spend five seconds in the water before having to take her out because she was upset, but she absolutely loved it! She splashed around like crazy, although she didn't seem to like the consequences of splashing herself. :) She'd go and swat her hands down on the water, spraying water everywhere and then act suprised, and rub her eyes and face with her hands to try to get the water off. I think one of her favorite moments was in the deeper water when Chris was holding her. I'd swim a little distance away from her and then quickly push forward through the water while Chris pulled her through the water so the two of us could meet in the middle. She usually likes that game of "Near...Far!" and I guess it was even funner in the water. One hysterical thing about swimming is that I'm sure we took half the pool with us with Harmony's diaper! It soaked up all the water and was her little flotation device. When you held her straight, her little butt would start to float up because the diaper was bouyant. And then taking it off, I realized it must have weighed at least a couple pounds! Yikes! :)
Chris and I were supposed to get out photos done with Harmony this weekend, but it didn't work out. :( On Saturday Harmony was fussy, and on Sunday, they called to cancel because the photo equipment was broken!!! Well, hopefully we'll get to do a family portrait for Harmony's 9 month photo. I'll still be getting her 6 month photos done on Thursday, and I'll be getting a disk too, to upload the pics onto this website. Also around her 6 month birthday, I'm planning on doing another set of footprints. And not to mention her 6 month checkup coming up soon. I'll finally get to know how long she is (and consequently, maybe get an idea of how much longer I get to keep her in her infant carseat!).
Harmony's Growth:
Harmony was weighed on Tuesday and she's up to 16 lbs 10 oz. Margo says that even though she's slowed down her weight gain, she's still gaining just the right ammount for her age.
Wax beans were Harmony's "vegetable of the week". She seems to really like those as well, and they're one of the veggies that she's less likely to be pukey with afterwards (peas are still the worse). I'm going to try a few more veggies before moving on to her first fruit. I think I'll do squash, and then hmm... what else is there? I'll try her on a few mixed ones maybe, like the carrots and peas, but I wont have to wait or anything because she's already had the two seperately with no reaction. She's still on her schedule of rice cereal in the AM, barley cereal in the PM, and a veggie for lunch, and she now usually has a bottle of apple juice/water (1oz/4oz) in the late afternoon on the way home from Bethany.
Harmony seems to be working on her hand eye co-ordination alot, especially now that she's really good at sitting unsupported. She'll be sitting up, will see a toy in front of her (or better yet, a soother!) and will lean towards the toy until she gets in, then straighten herself back to sitting to proceed with her exploration of the toy (which of course means sticking it right in her mouth!). I'm having the start being more careful with stuff lying around, like Kleenexes and such, because even if Harmony doens't get a hold of it, she tried for it, and then if you take it away out of her sight, she gets mad. I'm so surprised at how smart she is with spatial reasoning and what not! Today she was playing in the swing, and was really trying hard to try to get a toy into her mouth. Unfortunately it wouldn't reach her mouth because it was hanging from the swing's wind-up handle. Chris tried to just take away the toy and give her something else to play with, and she looked at the new toy for a second, then looked back up (like, way up!) at the swing wind-up handle where the toy had been. She did this a few times and seemed to be frustrated so I suggested Chris just give the toy to her so she could put it in her mouth. She eagerly accepted it and of course it went straight for the mouth! My little girl is just so smart! She's also getting good at holding her little bottle of juice and she's now a pro at getting her soother into her mouth. Now if only she could figure out how to get it into her mouth in the middle of the night when she wakes up! Oh well, hopefully those days will soon be over! :)