Author: magrilless

We went to the aquarium in Albuquerque a couple days ago. Although Maggie was a little more interested in shooing me through the maze of exhibits (as though the point of the visit was to navigate the dusky hallways) than to gawp at the bright and huge and bizarre fishies, she had a great time. We got to watch a man feed dead fish to a tank of rays and puffers; pet a sting ray once I held Maggie’s hand and touched it with her; jump up and off an oversized starfish; climb up a pier and look for dry land. Her favorite things were predictably all the activities that were exactly that: active. Then Nana and Baba met us for lunch at the restaurant where we watched sharks and giant sea turtles swim around and burrow under rocks.

She looks soooo grown up standing up there doesn’t she?

Okay, so, waking up at 3:30 has become a habit for this little one. And then she’ll go back to sleep with some bouncing and rocking. But it’s not deep, sleeping sleep. It’s squirmy, needy, dozy sleep that doesn’t make good rest for her or me. So when she “wakes up” at 5 to eat, she then wants to nap for a couple hours to make up for those fitful hours. That’s all well and good for her, but then the day has begun for me and I don’t get those couple of hours back. The end result is, we’ve gone back to feeding in the middle of the night. This may not be ideal, but the hope is we’ll get her at least sleeping for most of the time when people should be sleeping, awake during the daytime, and napping kind of the same time of day as Maggie. We’ll see how this experiment goes. I’m also starting to put her arms inside her pajamas (a little baby straight jacket) because she’s getting out of her swaddling and that may be contributing to the wakefulness. Bill points out that I’m changing two variables at once which makes for unreliable results in an experiment. I may not be a good scientist, but I won’t be the walking dead so I don’t care so much about the scientific method right now.

And by the way, Tessa’s eyes are definitely blue. Hair color we’re still unclear about. But Bill says her eyes are identical to mine. One mystery solved.

I feel like Fridays are boring for ya’ll since Tessa is such an easy baby. She’s continuing to be just a precious little bundle of joyfulness. She did add a couple of mid-night wakings to keep it interesting this week, but we hypothesize this is a diaper issue more than a sleeping issue. Lay off the beans, mom.

She has added a few new sounds to her talking repertoire. She’s always been an “aaaa” (as in apple) and “gggg” girl. Now she’s gotten some little gurglies going on and “bbbb”. She always looks surprised when “b” comes out. Pretty cute.

Tess does a lot of crunches all day long, so I’m predicting sitting pretty soon, at least for a couple seconds if helped into position. She’s looking old to me lately.; growing up so fast.

Oh, this girl is just short of perfect. Four nights this week she slept until at least 5:00. One night she kept waking up but I shoved the pacifier in her mouth and put her on my chest, and she went back to sleep. So maybe I’ll continue to do that for her and see if she’s content to at least not eat all night, even if she needs a little TLC. Then we will eventually be sleeping all night long all week long! I guess we’ll have to start thinking about moving her out of the bassinet and into her crib in her own room. And she’s almost too big for her receiving blankets to swaddle her efficiently now. We’ll have to work on transitioning that out too. Big girl!

Her big failing continues to be about eating. The spitting up continues, and I think it’s even more of a problem when it’s been a long time since she last ate. So normally her breakfast doesn’t really stay down for long. (As Bill says, I’m still spending the calories, so it shouldn’t bother me too much. Plus, Tessa is totally unconcerned whenever it happens.) So, we’ll just change clothes and change clothes and change clothes. She is also completely impatient when she decides she’s hungry. Bill looked at the clock a couple nights ago. It was 6:32 when she started making signs she wanted to eat. At 6:33 she was absolutely frantic. About to starve to death. Madder than anything that I was making her wait at all. She’s a funny one.