first, the beanie. when we were in the hospital, the second the nurses got her away from me, they popped a pacifier in emmeline's mouth. for the record, i have absolutely no issue with the pacifier; i was just worried about nipple confusion and all of that in the first couple of days. as it turned out, that was not an issue at all, and emme was in love with her beanie from then on. as soon as she started sleeping for slightly longer stretches of time, we realized that the pacifier may be our best friend sometimes, but it might also be our sleep enemy. when it fell out of her mouth, it would wake her up, and when she woke up and it wasn't in there, it would make her really sad. in the early days, we would just get up and put it back in and all was well. but, since she's older and so much more aware of everything now, i didn't know if this was a help or a hindrance. in any case, waking up 2-3 times a night when you work full time to put a pacifier in your baby's mouth is not a winning proposition for any duration of months...
so, i've been reading a book called sleeping through the night by jodi mindell. in this book, they talk about positive and negative sleep associations. i won't get into it all (although i do think it's really interesting), but basically i believe that the beloved beanie had become a negative sleep association. meaning, even though it helped soothe her and put her to sleep, it was the thing that caused her night wakings and ended up disrupting her sleep (and prevented her from falling asleep on her own). anyway...right or wrong, i decided to see if we could eliminate the pacifier. this was the precursor to sleep training. i should also mention that my pediatrician advised me to be done with the paci by 6 months, and to just cut it out cold turkey.
wednesday night (i'm pretty sure that was wednesday) was the end of the pacifier and it was not fun. emme cried for about 45 minutes after being put down and it pretty much broke my heart. i had to stay in the kitchen and keep myself busy with chores and obsessively watch the clock until the next time i was allowed to go check on her. BUT...she did fall asleep, without the pacifier. and she only woke up a couple of times, and those weren't bad. thursday night i decided was the official first night of sleep training (even though wednesday kind of counted too). she cried for another 45 minutes and i had to force myself to re-read the chapter about this whole thing and make internal bargains like "i will try this and if it's still this horrible on sunday, i don't have to do it anymore". friday night, mom came into town. i was worried since kk hates to hear that bunny cry almost as much as i do. but i stayed strong and she was asleep within a magical 11 minutes. saturday night, we were down to 8 minutes, and tonight i don't think i heard even a full minute of cries. AMAZING. everything i read and everything everyone told me was that it would be worth it, and i must say if she keeps this up it was worth every single second. not only do i feel like a new person getting more than 2-3 sequential hours of sleep, but emme is waking up in the BEST mood because she's getting great rest. i seriously could not be happier about this whole series of events.
the other big action this week was starting solids. i have read and researched way too much, and i decided that organic bananas were what we were going to start with. since mom was coming to town, and emme seemed more than ready (it's crazy because 2 weeks ago i would have said she was not ready at all and then it was like she woke up this week demanding to eat food), i figured it would be fun to try it on friday night with all of us around. so i mashed up a bite of banana with some breast milk and offered emme her first "real" food. she took to that stuff like she'd been eating for years. it was awesome. thankfully, jb was there to document the event. i think our next food will be avocados one day this week....
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