We’ve started putting Elise down without nursing her. Specifically, we decided and Meredith has executed, putting Elise down without nursing her. It was pretty much a guarantee that Ellie would fall asleep nursing when Meredith fed her at 7:30-ish each night. However, many experts will tell you and we can confirm, that the way a child falls asleep is the way they are going to want to go back to sleep when they wake up in the middle of the night. Therefore, if you rock a child to sleep, they are going to need to be rocked back asleep at 2:00 AM. If you nurse them, you will have to nurse them back to sleep. So all the Dad’s out there – if you want to guarantee that you will not be the one getting up to take care of junior in the night, then have mom nurse her to sleep- ‘Cause even if she makes you get out of bed, eventually, she’ll have to come in an save the day!
(Note: Dads. A wise man once told me that our job is to keep Mom happy, so I advise against making her be the one to get up and feed the little one. In my experience, Moms like sleep and will reward you for your late night sacrifices.)So how is it going you ask? Great, surprisingly. Meredith feeds Elise around 6:15 PM, then it's bath time and the whole nighttime ritual which includes the family reading of "Goodnight Moon" and saying goodnight to many things upstairs together. Now, instead of feeding her, we lay her in the crib, and whisper 'goodnight.' We started out singing, ”Goodnight Sweetheart”, but that seemed to make her cry… if you’ve ever heard us sing, you’d understand why. ;-) Anyway, once we stopped singing her to sleep, she went down really easily. We just put on the Ocean Wonders Aquarium and she slips gently into dreamland. The whole process takes 10 minutes tops - it's been wonderful how easy it is to get her to go to sleep with our new process! I wish we'd tried this earlier!
Now, Elise pretty much wakes up in the late 4:00 AM – early 5:00 AM area. This is very early, but it’s a whole lot better than 2:00 AM. Interestingly though, on Thursday night/morning, we woke to the sound of the Ocean Wonders Aquarium lullaby, not Elise – there were some noises, but she was more or less alternating between whining and cooing as she played with the aquarium. When it stopped, there was some silence and then it started again. Meredith and I could not go back to sleep due to a) the noise and b) the fact that over and over again, our genius daughter had figured out how to play and restart the music! Finally, the full on complaining kicked in and Elise was up for the day. We still have not figured out if she was doing this on purpose, or kicking her legs up and hitting it, or how. Further early morning playing will reveal her intentions I'm sure.
One note about the early rising, while it completely disagrees with our circadian rhythms, it’s really nice having a full morning with Elise. She’s usually in a good mood and we can take our time, playing with her, drinking our coffee and getting ready. We’ve really come to rely on it and it’s just a wonderful start to the day. Any chance to get more QT with the baby is a very, very good thing.Lastly, this week should also be known as the week of the fruit. They say that you should start out by giving your baby vegetables because they are not as sweet, and she needs to develop a taste for them, before fruits come in and ruin the enjoyable bland party. Oh, my lord is that the truth! Last weekend we gave her bananas for the first time and let me tell you it was like she had never eaten before. She wanted more and more and fast wasn’t fast enough. I never thought there would be something she would want more than booby juice, but then came bananas. You couldn’t feed her fast enough. I think she would have been happiest sticking her head into a large vat of them and eating her way out. Then later in the week came applesauce. She’s cooled down a bit in her
reactions, but she will happily eat enough applesauce or bananas until her tummy is full and she feels sick. Have you ever seen that scene from Monty Python’s History of the World – Part I where the obese man eats everything and then one last thin after- dinner wafer… yeah, it’s like that!All in all, the Molloy’s are doing great – settling into a nice routine, which means of course that everything is about to change. Again.
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