You’ve been sleeping great again for the past three nights and you seem to be back to your normal routine. I am guessing you were just having a hard time sleeping comfortably with your stuffy nose. But it feels amazing to have you back to a more predictable, sleep-filled schedule at nighttime, and it is enabling your dad and I to get back into a routine also. A couple nights I’ve even gone to bed shortly after you do, around 8:30, to catch up on sleep. Let’s hope this pattern sticks!

When papa was talking with Sarah a couple of weeks ago she mentioned that Francesca likes music, and especially likes listening to it to fall asleep. I’ve played you music sometimes, but we should probably play it more often. Usually when we’re hanging out and I’m doing laundry or chores, I’ll turn it on. Or, when we’re driving we often turn on the Baby Einstein classical music CD that Ann bought you. But we haven’t ever played music to get you to sleep, though we do often turn on the Sleep Sheep.

Tonight, nana and papa watched you while we went to a concert. Dad said you really liked the little toy on your playmat that plays music, and when he went to put you down he brought it into your room and kept playing it, over and over. He said by the fifth time you were asleep. I guess we’ll need to start adding music to your nap- and night-time routines.

Today when we went to pick you up from Isla’s you were still in the outfit you’d been in when we dropped you off this morning. This is a rarity, and I commented on it. I then bent over to pick you up from the Exercauser and pulled you in to give you a kiss, and I realized you were all wet. Dirty, is a better word. You had poo running down your leg and it was all over your feet and the Exercauser. It got all over my arm and shirt. Your dad took you and cleaned you off and changed you, while I cleaned myself and the Exercauser. Apparently I spoke to soon about making it through the day in one outfit!

Hanging with dad at the soccer field, post poo-saster

Well, you’ve moved past the stage of rolling onto your belly at naptime or nighttime and then getting frustrated, and you’ve instead started to just give in to being on your stomach. We’ve found you multiple times on your stomach, asleep. I’ve been gently rolling you back over, but today decided to call the doctor to ask if it’s alright for you to sleep this way. With her reassurance, we’re now leaving you on your stomach if that’s how you end up. You seem pretty content this way, and we find you like this about half of the time now.

Cozy on your belly

Last night your nana and papa volunteered at Chautauqua and then stayed here afterward. This morning you were getting fussy and sleepy, and needed a nap. I asked your papa if he wanted to rock you and read to you and try to get you to sleep, and he jumped at this chance to be with you. I went in my office to do some work and came out to check on you two in a little bit. You’d fallen asleep on his lap and he was rocking you; he looked so happy and peaceful. I went back into my office and kept working, and came out an hour or so later. He was still there, happily rocking away with you.

When you finally awoke after about two hours I was talking with him and said that he could have laid you down in your bed. He said, “I know, but I don’t ever get to spend any time alone with her. This was the longest I’ve ever got to hold her.” He seemed so satisfied to have gotten to start off his day with snuggles with you. If you ask me, that’s the perfect way to start any day!

Today when we got home from work your nana told us that she got you to giggle. You have been smiling for a few months, and when you’re really happy you hold out your arms and legs and squeal with joy. But you haven’t ever really laughed or giggled. We couldn’t believe we’d missed it! We all acted goofy and tried to get you to giggle, but we didn’t succeed. It’s sad when we miss some of your ‘firsts’. We also missed your first swinging adventure! The nanny walks you every day to the neighborhood park, and she informed us that she put you in the bucket swing, padded it up with some blankets (since you didn’t come close to filling it up) and gently pushed you. She said you love it. Your dad and I plan to take you swinging soon, so we can experience your reaction to it ourselves. I know that there’s no way around it and that we will unfortunately miss some of your first experiences with things, but we’re trying our very hardest to minimize our time away from you and to maximize your exposure to lots of different things, even though sometimes that exposure necessarily occurs when you’re not with us.

Today we’d planned to meet Liz and John and their two girls for dinner at the Sun. They texted a few minutes before we were to meet them saying that one of their girls had just got sick on the drive to Boulder, and they had to turn around and head home. I felt so bad for them and hope their daughter feels better soon. I am dreading all of the germs you’ll be exposed to as you start interacting more and more with other children, and I am hopeful that you’ll have good immunity and won’t get sick very often. It seems though, like no matter what we do or how careful we are or healthy you generally are, you’re going to get sick. I already know from this little cold that you’ve been fighting that this is going to be really hard. Especially while you’re so little and fragile and uncommunicative. Somehow it seems like it’ll be a little easier to deal with when you can tell us what is wrong and we can communicate with you what we’re doing to help you get better. But until then I’ll keep nursing you to keep your immunity strong and we’ll try to minimize your exposure to sick kids.

Hanging out at Southern Sun

I’m unsure if it’s all of the changes in sleeping locations and patterns you experienced last week during our vacation, or your cold, or the hot weather, or something else entirely, but you are not sleeping well at all. Your dad and I are doing everything we can think of to determine what’s causing you to not sleep well and to help you sleep better. We’re reading sleep books, researching solutions online, trying different strategies (cloth diapers versus disposable, swaddling versus not, footed pajamas versus a onesie, AC on or windows open), but nothing really seems to be working. I did read that oftentimes a change in sleep patterns preceeds a big developmental milestone by three to four weeks, so I keep thinking in a couple weeks you may start exhibiting a new skill.

Regardless, this is exhausting. When I was on my leave and you weren’t sleeping well, although it was still very tiring, I could at least rest with you during the day. But now that I’m back at work, and needing to look presentable and think clearly during the days, it really is hard to manage with little sleep. You are sleeping some, but you’re waking multiple times in the night. For many, many months now you’ve been sleeping great and waking once in the night to feed, then going back to sleep immediately thereafter. The past week or so you’ve been waking multiple times in the night, and when we put you down after a feeding you usually startle awake with a cry. Then we pick you up and you immediately stop crying and snuggle up to us, only to start crying again when we put you down. You did this when you were very little, but haven’t done it since. Your dad’s found that if he brings you into our bed, or goes and lies down with you on the couch, then you’ll fall back asleep. But I do not sleep well when you’re in bed with us, worried that you’ll get tangled in the sheets or that we’ll somehow roll over you. So even though we’ll finally get you to sleep, I am then awake.

And one other negative aspect of getting little sleep is that after multiple nights of this, I become overwhelmed and highly emotional. So in addition to being overly tired himself, your dad is then having to deal with a weapy and emotional wife. In the moment I know I’m being irrational, but I am just not capable of pulling it together when I’m so tired. The world just seems overwhelming, and the sleep problems seem insurmountable and neverending. I imagine that they will last indefinitely, and the bolded text from the sleep book that read ‘sleep problems that manifest in infancy can lead to sleep problems throughout a person’s entire life’ keeps flashing through my head. Although this has only been going on for a week, and even though it is likely that this period will pass and you’ll move into another one of predictable, good sleep, it’s just hard to imagine it any other way when we’re down in the trenches of such a sleepless and unpredictable routine.

This evening you accompanied your dad and I to sushi. Although of course you didn’t actually eat in, it was in some ways your first sushi experience (well, your first time in a sushi restaurant). We were seated outside and you were content just looking around and watching all the people passing by. Friends of ours from soccer walked by with their infant son and we joked that someday you two will be playing soccer together. I can’t wait!

In the middle of last night I awoke with a panic, a physical start to something unknown. I got up and checked on you and then verified that all of the doors were locked. Everything was fine and I got back in bed and tried to sleep. I was exhausted and on the verge of sleep, but I kept feeling a strong feeling of anxiety in my chest. I cannot adequately describe it, but it was a physical pain that took my breath away. I tried deep breathing, I tried thinking through what my fear was, I tried thinking of anything else, but I could not get the feeling to go away and I could not fall asleep. Giving in to it, I decided to get up.

Your dad came and found me awhile later, in tears and reading things on the computer. He asked me what was wrong and although I’m still not entirely certain about exactly what caused me so much distress, I conveyed to him that perhaps my mind and my body were reacting to a statistic I had just recently read – that the incidences of SIDS deaths increase after a baby has a cold. I am petrified of loosing you. When I think of anything happening to you, I literally feel pain and become teary-eyed. The love I feel for you, though not unexpected, is crushingly strong.

Someday you’ll fall in love. The head-over-heels, can’t focus on anything, butterflies in your tummy kind of love of teenagers. You’ll feel like that person is the center of your world, and your mind will be constantly preoccupied with that person, even at the times when your body is not physically with them. The first time I felt this way was with your dad, and until this point, these have been some of the most powerful feelings of love that I’ve experienced. Until you. Before you were even a little presence in my belly, from the time when you were an idea in our mind, something we wanted to try for, we loved you. It became more of a tangible love when you became real, a tiny creature inside of me. And throughout those months, as you grew and I grew, so did our connection to you. I am not sure if there is any other connection in life such as this, one that exists before you even know a person and grows into something so strong and powerful, a dependence so necessary.

I need you. I need you to brighten my day, motivate and challenge me. I need you to make our little family complete. We love you so much, and are thankful for you every day. And we’ll do every thing in our power to keep you happy, healthy and safe.