Random Thoughts From a Mommy

I'm a bit travelled out if you can believe it. Travelling with a baby is not as fun as I had anticipated, especially when doing it on my own. We have a trip to Nevada/Utah next week, and I think after that, I could do without travelling for awhile. Mack has been grabbing her ears, drooling, and having a slight fever all week. I can only assume this means she is either teething or has an ear infection. Then just last week, she decided to get a cold. So yeah, it's been great. Mackenzie was congested and started rolling to her side to breathe better. Only she would roll all the way over to her stomach. Then she would proceed to get really cranky because she doesn't want to roll back on to her back on her own. Needless to say, it's been a trying few days going in to roll her back over. So yes, soother back in and no more CIO. Good news is that she's still STTN about 7 hours. And mostly she will go down on her own. Went to visit my friend's baby the other day

It's hard to believe Mack is 20 weeks old already. That's half a pregnancy, LOL! Nothing too drastic happened this week. She's not rolling over anymore (she's decided it's too much work), she's not sitting up yet (but she'd rather stand because there are places to go, you know), and she's not giggling yet (we even ripped some paper like this dad did ...nothing worked!). So you know, nothing earth shattering to write about. We are in Red Deer/Edmonton this week. Any sleep training we did are well...gone. Soother back in, rocking to sleep, her sleeping with us. (sigh) We go home tomorrow. Bryan doesn't come home for 5 days. Which means, it's me and the kid against the soother and sleep. Wish us luck. This could get ugly. If you don't get a week 21 update, it means the kid won.

I just noticed this week that I can no longer wrap my fingers around Mackenzie's thighs. She now has the thunder thighs I was dreaming of in the beginning. But now that she has them, I'm a little sad that she's growing so fast. We'll be starting solids in just over a month! I realized today that I am more sad about Mackenzie growing than actually enjoying her. Most days I look at her and I go, "I can't believe how much she's grown! I miss her being so little!" So I think I need to stop, take a step back, and actually enjoy this whole journey. Otherwise, I'm just going to miss out on it! So operation sans soother, sans swaddle, sans rocking, CIO, and STTN is well...a semi-success. Out of the 3 naps during the day, Mack will go down on her own once without crying, then once crying for about 5-10 mins, then once absolutely wailing. All 3 naps are with a sleep sack, no swaddling. The last 2 nights, Mack has gone down to sleep for the night on her

After 7 days and 6 nights of no soother, CIO, and minimal rocking/picking up...the answer was so obvious. I don't know why I had missed this for a whole week. We did this one thing last night and it made all the difference. She slept for 10 hours, with 2 dream feeds before Bryan and I went to bed, which meant 7.5 hours of sleep with no feeds in between. Day 4-6 were as horrific as any other. Nap times were ok-ish. Took anywhere between 10-20 minutes for her to go down. We cut the night time to about 30-45 minutes of CIO. And she wouldn't go down on her own either. She only ever went down after one of us rocked her for about 2-5 minutes! So I thought with this much CIO, she must STTN! Nope! This girl was keeping us on our toes! She was waking at least 2-3 times a night, with at least one time in there of 30 minutes of wailing. Sometimes, she would just wake at 3 am cooing and playing. Bryan and I were running on no sleep with her being in the same room with us. We just resor

I'm not sure if I wrote this before (my baby brain still intact), but Mackenzie WAS sleeping through the night beautifully for awhile. And then suddenly, no more. At first, she was waking 1-2 times a night and she would be fine when we pop the soother back in. Then it increased to 3-4 times a night. Then this past week, she started waking us up 6-8 times a night just for the soother! It was costing us our sanity. Bryan wakes up at 5:30 am every morning for a conference call, and I, well, I just don't function without sleep. In fact, I have no idea how I did it those first few week at all. Must be the mommy hormones. Well, those hormones have died, they're not keeping me going like they were before. So the only solution? Taking away the soother. I read up about it, did some research on it. Apparently, this is a really common problems amongst parents! Loads of parents were fooled to have the best sleeping baby in the world, and suddenly, their world is torn apart by