Ellie Milestone @ 15 1/2 weeks . . .

I put Ellie on the floor last night to change her diaper. Once I had most of her clothes off I decided to give her a little tummy time. She seems to prefer tummy time when she has little clothing on. I think she feels like she can move around better. And she proved it . . . after only being on her tummy for a few minutes, she pushed up on her right arm and then rolled over to her back! She did it like she had done it a million times before. I rolled her back over and tried to cheer her on so she would do it again, but she didn't roll over. Oh well. I can't wait until she does it again!

Breakthrough!

My mom mentioned to me that one of the girls at her work swaddled her 2 month old baby and that baby was already sleeping through the night! I kind of dismissed the advice because I used to swaddle Ellie and it didn't seem to matter either way. But then I decided I was desperate enough to try anything. Ellie has been waking up at least 3 times a night to feed and usually 2 other times she just wakes up and I have to give her a binky to get her back to sleep. So two nights ago I swaddled her and put her to bed at 7pm. She slept about 15 minutes and somehow managed to houdini her way out of the swaddle. So I rocked her (without a swaddle) and got her back in bed around 8:30pm. She was up again at 11:30 for a feeding and after an hour of trying to rock her back to sleep after she ate (she is stuffy though and was having a harder time getting to sleep), I was so frustrated. I decided to wrap her in a blanket as tight as I thought was safe. ALMOST INSTANTLY she fell asleep! And the best part . . . SHE SLEPT UNTIL 6AM!!!

I was worried that it might have been a coincidence, but last night I swaddled her tight and put her down at 8pm. She woke up at 12:30 to eat, went easily back to sleep, and didn't wake up again until 6:30am! YAY!!! Let's hope this is the solution because I have already gotten used to getting 4-6 straight hours of sleep.

Ellie and the sleepless nights

Seriously, I don't remember being this tired ever in my life. EVER. Sometimes I don't trust my memory, especially when I am trying to compare Ellie's growth and development to Tate at the same age. But I really think that Tate was a much better sleeper than Ellie. Not only do I seem to remember that he slept in nice good chunks of hours at a time, I also seem to remember that he was easy to put back to sleep after a late night feeding. To be fair, I do remember that sometimes getting him to sleep in the evening consisted of an hour of singing or humming the Brady Bunch theme song (I don't know the words to a lot of songs off the top of my head). Anyway, the point of this post is to document my struggle with Ellie and her lack of sleeping at night. Currently, her sleeping schedule is thus: in bed for the night around 9pm (we have tried to put her down earlier and she just won't go), up at 1am for a feeding and back to bed pretty easily, up at 4am for a feeding and putting her back down takes quite a bit longer (for some reason she thinks 4am is the time to party and often starts talking and wanting to interact), up again at 6am (that is only 2 hours from the last time she got up!) for another feeding and an even longer task of putting her back down to sleep. Usually by the time I get her back to sleep Tate is up for the day. I am slowly losing my sanity.