Insomnia

Elle has me on her schedule. She usually falls asleep about 1am but she went to bed early tonight but I am still up just watching her sweet, little mouth form whistle lips. I wonder what she is dreaming about. Elle has started smiling this week and it is the best thing ever to see her do it.

In a few minutes, my extreme exhaustion will hit but for now and I savoring the sound of her delicate, infant breaths. There is no better sound.

Common Sense, Persistence and Perspective

Elle will be 6 weeks old in two days. I cannot believe how quickly time has gone. My mother told me when she was born that the days would go slow and the weeks would go fast. She was very right. Sometimes the days seems to stretch on and on but then before you know it, she is another week older. The past six weeks have been a mix of bliss, fatigue and frustration. Everything about infants is trial and error. There are three things I have learned slowly over the past six weeks that has saved my sanity.

1. Common Sense. There are thousands of parenting books out there. I was very careful to not read too many of these books because of the conflicting information. It seems that someone has a baby, learns how to sooth it and writes a book divulging the "secrets" of successful parenting. When you are having trouble with latching, boobs that don't seem to produce enough milk or a fussy baby, every book will have a different solution thus throwing the new mother into a confusing tailspin when suddenly you are trying 100 different things driving yourself and your baby crazy. During the early weeks when I was in the throws of one of Elle's fussy periods, my common sense when right out the window. I would get online to research a solution, find 10 and try them all. We would get no where since I would try something for 2 minutes and if it did not work, I would try something new- transitioning Elle to tons of positions, shushing in her ear, rocking her, putting the paci in, taking the paci out, swaddling and unswaddling her. Had I used my common sense, I would have realized I was making everything worse and confusing Elle. Now when something pops up, I step back and take a breath. Once my head is clear I remember that I am a smart girl and I can solve this- and I usually do.

2. Persistence. I mentioned this in the previous section but persistence goes a long way with an infant. Elle loves to suck on things and her paci usually soothes her but sometimes, she will spit it back out and begin to fuss. I know nothing else is wrong (thank you common sense) since Elle is fed, clean, burped and warm but she is tired and it is my job to help her get to sleep. So when she spits the paci out, mom is there to pop it back in. Sometimes that can take 40 minutes of paci popping and rocking, but success is when Elle is finally asleep. So true the saying, if at first you don't succeed try, try again little mama.

3. Perspective. Having an infant is exhausting. I used to get frustrated with Elle when she would wake up for the 6th time at 3am. Of course I would get frustrated, I was so tired! A little perspective goes a long way when I felt like I was going to hit the wall. My perspective came after reading a wonderfully written birth story about a baby born with Down Syndrome. How lucky am I to have a healthy, happy baby? What a disservice I am doing to that mother, not to mention the millions of mothers who long for children they are unable to conceive, if I take my frustrations out on Elle? Because they are MY frustrations. Elle cannot deceive me. All she knows is that something is wrong and she cannot sleep. The only way she knows how to deal with it is to cry. By having this baby, I agreed to the terms and so now after a lot of learning, I am happily doing the work. It is not easy but it is all so worth it.

I love you baby Elle.

One Month Old Baby Product Rave

Our little bean is growing up so fast! I cannot believe that we are already hitting that one month mark. The first few weeks, all Elle wanted to do was sleep. We had to wake her up to eat and change her diaper. On the third week, Elle decided that she would sleep all day and be up all.night.long! We would try to keep her up more during the day but there was simply no waking the little one. Finally, with the purchase of a few choice items, we were able to get her to sleep for 5 hour stretches at night.

The first of these wonderful products is the Wubanub- a simple invention of a paci attached to a stuffed animal (picture beanie baby). One thing we quickly learned out Elle is the girl loves to suck. Before we introduced the paci, she would be endlessly sucking on, well, me since I am breastfeeding her. We introduced a basic paci but the dang thing would fall out of Elle's mouth, jerking her awake, thus jerking me awake. The pattern became fall asleep, paci falls out, baby yells out in frustration, mom wakes up, reinserts the paci, rinse and repeat. No one was really sleeping. The small animal attached to the paci allows the paci to say in her mouth (most of the time the animal, who happens to be a frog, is laying on Elle's chest, staring at her while sucks).

Another product we purchased is a very tight sleep sack call the Woombie. This sack allows Elle to move her arms and legs but she cannot clock herself in the eye and wake herself up with her crazy arm. Elle uses this as a last resort since she also does well with the Escape Proof Swaddle- yes I found that on youtube.

The final purchase was the Sleep Sheep. This stuffed sheep produces wonderful white noise that lulls Elle to sleep every time. The sheep offers whale sounds (which are quite high-pitched and alarming in my opinion), heart beat (again a little creepy to wake up to the sound of a heart beat blaring in the bedroom), the rain sound and the wave sound. Elle prefers the later two. Actually I do not know which one she prefers but her Dad and I prefer not to feel like we are living in a womb or 1000 leagues under the sea.