It is time to play

Selena has been a lot of fun the past month. She is starting to have an imagination and a sense of humor and it is fun to see all the new things she can do. It's funny because most of the things really aren't that impressive to most people, but to me it is so fascinating to watch her doing things that she couldn't a month or two ago.

Some of these amazing feats include: playing cook in the kitchen by taking a spoon and mixing stuff up, wanting to help us sweep, vacuum and pick weeds. Reaching up for me to hold her hand when she is walking over a challenging surface or changing surface. Turning around and waving bye bye to me when I ask her where she is going. Reading a book in the car. Giving me zerberts. Refusing to give me or dad kisses, but always giving Dyna kisses. Playing ring-around-the-rosie. Dancing to the songs on American Idol - Seyesha is her favorite. Pointing and getting excited at animals and pictures of animals wherever we go.


She still isn't talking much. She pretty much uses 'da' for every thing. Dada - dada, Dyda - Dyna, Da - dog. She says Da da Dy da all the time. She has added bye bye and diaper change to her signing vocabulary but only uses the latter if I say it first.

She has also finally settled on a consistent bed and nap time. That doesn't mean she still doesn't wake up every 2 to 4 hours during the night but I don't have to guess when to start getting her ready for bed or a nap. All the sleep experts recommend getting your child to sleep at consistent times but this was really hard for me because I didn't know if I was supposed to wake her up in the morning if she slept "too late", and what was I supposed to do if she woke up too early? At night if I tried to force her (ie. rock or nurse her till she was comatose) to sleep when she didn't want to she would wake up every half-hour for the rest of the night--and that was just exhausting for me. And I really did not feel comfortable with letting herself cry herself to sleep.

So we usually would have a schedule for about 4 days and then something would mess it up, be it activities, her needing to fill her diaper, Dyna barking at invisible things, etc. So being a pretty go-with-the-flow parent I just decided that four day schedules are fine and we can create a new one whenever we needed to. But now (for the last two months) she has settled into a schedule all on her own and even if she does end up napping at a different time she still goes to bed around the same time. I also don't have to rock her or hold her while she falls asleep and she did that all on her own as well. I am hoping that since she has progressed in this respect, sleeping longer stretches will also happen soon.


I also figured a while back that rather than read books about how to get my baby to sleep I preferred reading about other babies that didn't sleep. I found this blog -- http://sleepisfortheweak.wordpress.com/ . I especially like their list of excuses for why your baby doesn't sleep and Sleep training - a baby's view.