Somebody in the house turns one today

My little girl is now one! I can't believe how fast (and slow) the past year has gone. She has grown from a squinty blob to a walking, talking little girl. The milestones that we were so excited about at the time, rolling over, sitting up, first smile are now vauge blurs. I can't even remember the month that she did these things. I should have written them down. I can remember days of incredible love, where I thought that I would explode from the strength of my feelings, to days where I would have happily traded her in for another baby. Preferably one that sleeps.

Our sleep training is moving along. She is in her own room now and in her cot. She is now sleeping for hours at a time and last night she settled herself twice after a brief awakening. But she is also still waking up screaming sometimes and won't go back to sleep for hours. Everything I read about sleep training they certainly never said that it would take a month and the crying has not stopped yet. But I can see that she is feeling much brighter during the day with quality sleep at night. The best feeling is when I put her to bed, with lots of love and cuddles and she just settles herself down and falls asleep. Less fun is 2.30 - 4.30 am standing on the edge of her cot, screaming her head off. I think that this time of night is hard for her because she is still tired, but has just had eight hours uninterupted sleep which is the longest she has slept since birth.

I must go and take birthday girl out for a walk. I am going to get her her first baby chino as well.

Waterloo sunset

Bagels for breakfast this morning. They always make me think about working at Waterloo Station in London in the offices looking over the very busy concourse. There was a bagel cart there which did delicious toasted bagels which you could get with vegemite! Every day when I went to work there I would either sing Abba or The Kinks depending on what mood I was in that day. Ahhh fun times.

Not so much fun times with Miss Z's sleep training, after a very successful night on Wednesday night where she slept for 6 hours Thursday night was hellish. She woke up at 3.30 and just wouldn't stop crying or go to sleep. Yesterday was slightly better but only very short naps were taken during the day and she woke up a lot, every 2 hours at night. I noticed (because my sleep is very very shallow) that whenever Mr KR would do anything in his sleep, snore, have a small nightmare Miss Z would start awake. That meant that I had to get her out of bed, feed her, resettle her and pat her until she fell asleep. Normally the process would only take 5 minutes but it now takes half and hour. And she is still waking up as much as she did when co-sleeping and feeding to sleep. Yesterday was a very sad day.

I am going to stick with this sleep training until Sunday. If it doesn't work then I don't know what I will do. I need sleep so badly.

general delightfulness

Today has been a day of fantasticness in the Killerrabbit household - I discovered that our local bookshop will buy my second hands books for $3, my pram has a new frame (not new material unfortunately) and I caught up with lots of lovely local mothers.

On the downside little Miss Z is refusing to go to sleep tonight. I eventually had to send in the Dad. She was just not dropping off and rolling all around the bed and cot instead of going to sleep. Maybe its her teeth but it looks to me that all the ones that should be popping through are through now. Seven in one month! I can't keep blaming the teeth for the poor sleep either. She is a clever little munchkin and has started trying to take her own shirt off at only 10 months (or is that normal?) so I know that she does have some idea what is coming when we start our sleep routine. I think that she might just be fighting it because she can.

She is working really hard on walking and is starting to take lots of unsupported risks and steps. It is very exciting. I am hoping that once the walking is mastered that she will just feel like sleeping through the night. Does this happen?

Feeding to sleep

OH MY GOD

Since the horrible four month sleep regression I have been feeding my little daughter to sleep.

It has stopped working. Just suddenly rather than closing her eyes and drifting off Z is still lying there wide awake, she then rolls and waves her arms and doesn't go to sleep. I just got her off for her morning nap after a lot of feeding, patting, lying back down and shushing. I really hope that this is the start of a big improvement in her sleep, rather than something that will make life even more difficult. But knowing little Z she is going to have a terrible time sleeping now.

But the good news is she only woke up twice last night.

Wow - long time between posts

Its amazing how something like a blogging can come and go from your life. I used to love writing about things that were going on with me and trying to come up with witty anecdotes from my life.

Then I had a baby.

I thought that I would magically have all this time to waffle about what motherhood meant to me and hopefully meet other mum bloggers. God I was amazingly unprepared for what a baby meant. Especially my delightful little cherub, who went through a seven month period of not sleeping and also had serious seperation anxiety from five months. Whew that was tough. I think that we are coming out the other side now, and I have adjusted my expectations of what I can achieve when Z is awake and asleep.

A couple of things saved me:
- Ask Moxie - a blog that highlighted some of the issues that parents face and helped me feel like I wasn't totally alone. There were other babies out there who really didn't sleep and that there wasn't much I could do except whatever gets us through.
- Chatting to mothers - especially a delightful friend in Brisbane who really made the effort, just when I needed to know I wasn't all alone. Hugs to you.

I will see how I go but I think I may be back, bitches.

To co-sleep or not to co-sleep

One of our first challenges was trying to get her to sleep. The first night she was just so precious that we couldn't put her to sleep in that big cot all by herself. If I tried to put her down in the little snuggle bed that we bought to go into the cot she would wake herself up in ten or fifteen minutes. Which was no good for either her, Mr KR or myself. I eventually worked out that she was only interested in sleeping on top or next to me, which meant that our shiny new cot was going to waste.

We had two home visits from midwives in the first couple of days and they were very concerned that Miss Z was sleeping in our bed with us. Which made me very nervous. But still she wouldn't sleep anywhere else aside from next to me in bed. I found it amazing that when she was sleeping next to me I wouldn't move a muscle and kept her cradled in the curve of my arm. She was so little that it was easy to keep her away from pillows or the doona or other dangerous smothering type things.

I then started frantically reading my baby books, one of which Baby Love didn't seem to mind co-sleeping and another What to Expect in the First Year seemed to think that co-sleeping was the path to grown children who are still in their parents bed and 12 year olds who are breastfeed. Which was worrying.

But still it was the only way that she would sleep at night. During the day she would sometimes go to sleep in my arms and be transferred into her cot but night time was a different story. I suppose that it is because babies days and nights are reversed as they were lulled to sleep by the day time motion of the movement of their mum and so night time is party time. It takes a little while for this to change so in the meantime Miss Z was only happy next to me.

Co-sleeping seems to be a polarising issue in the baby world. A large number of my family seem to have strong objections to this, even though it is really only in the western world that we expect newborn babies to be all by themselves after so long as part of their mum. So after about seven weeks of co-sleeping I was getting a little tired of being kicked while the baby was sleeping so we have been able to move her to her snuggle bed which is at the foot of our bed. However it was great to have her next to me for eight weeks and sometimes she still sleeps next to me.