SHE DID IT

So Sahana slept through the night for the first time last night. Straight through, from 11:30-7am. She was squawking on and off starting a little after 6, but no full-on crying. I am not getting my hopes up for a repeat performance tonight -- Paras took a couple of weeks to become consistent, as I remember. Plus she had a pretty crappy feeding at 6pm tonight, before she went to bed. I was so mad at her for not eating that I swaddled her and put her in the crib wide awake, half-hoping she would start crying, which usually gives me an opportunity to get another ounce in her to calm her down. But she went to sleep, all by herself! I figured she'd wake up before her 10:30 feed, but it's currently 10:16 and I haven't heard a peep so maybe the routine is taking over.

Speaking of the routine, the 7-10:30 "nap" has been pretty consistent for a while now, actually (knock on wood), which has given me and Andy and opportunity to go on some dates. For our five year anniversary we went out to dinner at a restaurant we hadn't tried before, and last Friday we dashed out after getting the kids to bed to catch the latest Harry Potter movie. I'm pretty proud of us for being able to get out like normal people with a toddler and a 7 week-old infant...at least without leaving the babysitter (the au pair in our case) with her hands full. Both times we came home to the au pair letting us know that the kids slept soundly while she surfed the net and chatted with her family online. Thanks, Gina Ford!

Meanwhile, I've developed achilles heel tendonitis, which is really annoying, because it means I can't exercise. I had it in December, but got some heel inserts (as per the doctor's instructions) and it went away. I thought it was related to the pregnancy. But it's back, and as I went online to see what else could be done about it, I got really depressed because everything I read kept referring to it as a "middle-age" sports injury. I was under the impression that 34 was still fairly young, but I guess I'm officially middle-aged.

Anyway, I've got to go limp upstairs and feed Sahana. Keep your fingers crossed for tonight!

Summer Fun

Last Saturday we went to the New Haven children's museum. I've been wanting to take Paras for a long time but I think he is only now getting to a point where he can enjoy it. They had a reading of a book called "Bugs," followed by a puppet show involving two dogs who shrink themselves and then walk through the backyard meeting bugs. I don't think Paras really followed the plot but he seemed to like watching the puppets.

Paras has been really funny lately with his imaginative play. Here is a photo of him "driving" George in his make-believe car. Notice the frisbee for a steering wheel and the pliers and blanket he's used for seatbelts on George and himself, respectively. (Apparently he's driving in the U.K. or some other Commonwealth country.)



Meanwhile, I finally got iLife '09 so I have my Flip movies on my computer. Here is a video of Paras having breakfast with my mom (whom he calls "Domi"), before going to school:



Sahana had a bit of a breakthrough last night -- she slept till 5:30 am, straight from 11pm! For some reason I feel like 5 am is the tipping point, and after that it's just a matter of time before she's sleeping till 7am. I'm hoping it's not a fluke -- I don't think so, since she slept till 4:45 a few nights ago and till 5 the night before last (after a brief wakeup and re-put down at 3:30). She's also gotten to be a much better burper -- nowadays it's the actually feeding that takes a while. She treats formula like it's a fine wine, and likes to sip it over the course of oh, about an hour. Very annoying. Paras used to down his bottle so fast we had to have a second one on deck because he would go beserk if you took a break to make a new bottle. Hopefully this means that they'll be different in other ways as well, such as throwing howling temper tantrums every night before going to bed.

And So It Goes...

Things are chugging along here. Andy and I are enjoying the summer with the kids. Last Sunday we went to visit my friend Lauren, who lives close by in CT. She has some out of control blueberry bushes in her yard so Paras got to go blueberry picking for the first time. He had a lot of fun trying something new and being with both Mommy and Daddy at the same time, which I think he craves since we are rarely around together. Of course, in the rush of making sure I had diapers for both kids, a bottle, and other kid gear, I forgot both my still and video camera. (UPDATE: Got a photo courtesy of Lauren):



However, I did capture on video Paras' latest craze, which is to put his Curious George stuffed animal in time out for various infractions (that usually Paras himself has committed in the not-so-distant past). Here is a clip of George getting time out for hitting everyone in the house:



Sahana has started to laugh and "talk" a little bit. She loves playing on her play gym and looking at her mobile. Here she is (once again) playing in her crib:



She's still waking up once a night, though now she's stretching it out to about 4:30am after her 10:30pm feed. Gina Ford says that babies will gradually stretch their night sleep out little by little...hopefully she'll make it all the way to 7am soon! She has been a champ during her daytime naps, which is a huge improvement over Paras. I'm still trying to figure out how we got to a point where we were able to put Paras in his crib wide awake and let him fall asleep on his own. Suggestions, anyone?

In the meantime, I started working out again after getting the green light from my OB. I am very sore from my pathetic workouts over the last two days. Back when I was at the FBI Academy, I could do 100 situps in 2 minutes while holding a 25lb. weight. Now I can barely do five situps. I guess I should be grateful I have the time to workout at all, thanks to the au pair.

I have more videos which I took on my new Flip camera my dad gave me...unfortunately, I can't get them onto my Mac because I don't have the latest version of iMovie. My iLife '09 suite should be coming in the mail soon, though, so I'll try to get them up this weekend.

A Ray of Hope

I meant to write yesterday, but I was too tired. Here was my night from 3 nights ago:

7pm -- Put Sahana to bed

7:15pm -- Read stories to Paras

8pm -- Paras has a poop -- change diaper

9pm -- Try to go to bed early

9:48pm -- Andy calls and wakes me up (by accident)

10pm -- Sahana starts crying, 30 minutes before she's supposed to be fed

10:06pm -- Sahana goes back to sleep (on her own -- yay!)

10:30pm -- Feed Sahana

11:30pm -- Paras is wailing from a nightmare while I'm trying to burp Sahana. Put Sahana to bed without a burp and go help Paras calm down and go back to sleep

11:45pm -- Go to bed

1am -- Paras has another nghtmare. Get up to comfort him

2:19 am -- Sahana wakes up earlier than normal. Go get her back to sleep until her normal feeding time of at least 3:30am

3am -- Go back to bed

3:30am -- Sahana up on the dot to be fed

4:15 -- Put Sahana down after feeding and burping her

6:45 -- Get up to get bottle (and my coffee) in time for Sahana's 7am wake up


So, you say, I must have gotten a 2 1/2 hour sleep in that last stretch. Wrong. After getting up so much all night, I was too wired by 4:15 to really get to sleep. So I was dead tired all the next day.

The other night, though, things got better. Sahana woke up earlier than her 3:30am feed again, so as usual I went to put her back down to see if she could eke out another 30 minutes. (For the non-parents out there, by the way, it's a rule of thumb that once the baby is sleeping until certain time at night, you want to avoid feeding them if they suddenly start getting up earlier, as then they will just make it a habit of getting up at the earlier time again.) Anyway, I put her back down around 3 am, got her bottle ready, and went to bed waiting for her to start crying. She slept until 6am without waking up! (I still didn't get any sleep, since I was on edge waiting for her to get up and also wondering whether she was still alive.) So it's nice to know she is capable of going through the night without a feed, though she hasn't done it enough for it to really be a pattern. In fact, she woke up at 4am last night -- which is an improvement over her previous 3:30 am streak.

So, I have a ray of hope. I remember that Paras slept through the night once, and then went back to waking up, but within two weeks of his first all-nighter, he was sleeping through regularly. So I am hoping that maybe by around 8 weeks Sahana will have gotten the habit of sleeping all night. My friend Lauren sent me some excerpts from a sleep book that says that 8 weeks is when babies start calming down anyway, so hopefuly it will all come together. I the meantime, I need a nap.

Mommy Date

Yesterday Paras and I had our first real Mommy date. He's been going on Daddy dates for while now -- every Sunday afternoon Paras will go with Andy on a trip to the pet store to look at the animals, then out for pizza. It started while I was pregnant, to give me a little bit of a break and to give Paras some quality time with Daddy, since Andy is away all week. Since Sahana was born, though, I need a break from cry-eat-poop-sleep cycle.

This date was unplanned, actually: I took Paras to play outside and he got on this sad little bike we've had in the backyard that has no pedals and tried to push himself around on it. His legs were way too long and it was just pathetic watching him try to scoot himself along. So I packed him in the car and we took a trip to Target, and I let him pick out his first real tricycle. The had a floor model and he rode it around the aisles, and was so excited as we took it to the front to check out. Then we went to Friendly's for lunch (mac n' cheese and purple ice cream), and stopped at the ASPCA adoption fair on the way home to look at the doggies and kitties. On the way home he said, spontaneously, "I had a lot of fun, Mom," which made my heart melt.

Paras got to ride his new bike for the first time after his nap. Here is a video of his first ride:



Sahana, meanwhile, continues to grow. She's stagnated at the 3:30-4am wake up...I'm hoping that she'll stretch that out a bit more in the next few weeks. The weeknights are a real drag for me -- since Andy is not here, it's really depressing having to face the long night, not knowing when she'll wake up and for how long, alone. Andy has been a huge help on the weekends, though. Somehow we've found a good pattern of handing Sahana off so we can both have some time to ourselves during the day, and taking turns at night. The whole thing is just much less overwhelming than it was with Paras. I think part of it is that we now know that she's going to emerge from this insanity in another few months: it's easier to live in the moment and just enjoy her as much as we can, even though neither of us are infant people. Anyway, here is a photo of Andy doing double duty with Paras and Sahana:

Growing Pains

So it looks like the sleeping till 5am thing was a fluke. However, 3:30 seems to be a consistent time for Sahana to get up at night these days, and I'm not complaining -- she can usually go from then until 7 am so it's still only one feeding at night. She's getting to be a better burper, too, so the feedings are getting shorter. Last night I was up and back to bed in about 40 minutes.

Sahana is growing like a weed. She has to weigh over 9 lbs. now. Here is a comparison of her at 1 1/2 weeks and at 1 month:





It actually freaked me out a little bit: I told Andy that I was worried that she would end up on one of those shows on TLC, about people with weird issues, like "World's Tallest Man," or whatever. But growing is good, I guess.

Speaking of growing, Paras is a total giant. We can't figure out when it happened, but he suddenly got very heavy and lost his baby face:



He's now a little boy. Andy gets really angry that Paras still wears a diaper -- I agree that he is ready to be potty trained. (Andy said of changing his poopy diaper, "It's like changing my dad." Not exactly the image I wanted to picture.) But, given that he is in total regression mode right now, it seems like it makes more sense to wait. The only good thing about the regression, by the way, is that Paras is drinking a lot more milk.

And speaking of heavy, I've got about 6 more pounds to lose. It's not so bad, actually -- I shrunk back faster this time than I did after Paras. But it was a little depressing when, a few days after I had Sahana, I weighed myself and saw that I had only lost 6 pounds. I mean, Sahana herself weighed almost 8. But maybe that was retained fluid or something. Anyway, Sahana and I got for a walk every day so I'm hoping to fit back into my old clothes before I go back to work. Maybe I'll post a before and after photo...but only if I lose it all.

OK, gotta run, I took a sleeping pill so I can catch some Zs before I have to feed Sahana again. Nothing good on TV tonight.

One Month Down

Well, we are approaching one month and Sahana is doing well. Last night she slept from 11pm to almost 5 in the morning! There have been some frustrating changes, though -- she's been harder to put down to sleep at her naps and at night. I guess she's growing and starting to become aware of the fact that she exists, so despite our Gitmo tactics -- making her stay awake for designated stretches and giving her most of her feeds during the day (which Andy calls "bottleboarding") -- and her being super tired when it's time to nap, she fights it. Andy reminded me that we went through the same thing with Paras, and he ended up being a good sleeper, so I'm hoping that it will be the same with Sahana.

I think Andy mentioned on his blog that Sahana is impossible to burp. It is really annoying. She gets these huge air bubbles and then refuses to eat anymore, and then it can take up to 30 minutes to burp her. If we put her down without burping her, she'll either spit up or wake up early because she didn't get enough to eat. So middle of the night feedings can take up to an hour. One day I told Andy that the night before Sahana burped both during and after her feed within 2 minutes, which meant that I got to go back to sleep within half an hour. Andy's response was, "Yeah, sometimes you have those magical moments." It's really sad that "magical moments" with an infant consists of expelling gas. Sad, but true.

Here is the latest video of Sahana, doing her daily tummy time.