Thursday, June 18, 2009

3, 2, 1 ....

We have liftoff! Sometime in the night the baby fairy visited our house again and taught Lucy how to crawl. Really, on her hands and knees with actual forward progress that doesn't take an afternoon to get three feet. Look out Shorty, there's no escaping now!

Monday, June 8, 2009

Ferber

The Ferber Method (ferberizing as it's known here) is a way of getting your baby to put herself to sleep, which sounds like an excellent idea to me. Information I've found on the Ferber Method talks about first trying a sleep-schedule for babies and using toys or blankets that babies will associate with sleep to get your baby to sleep on her own. Only when this fails should you move on to using Ferber. I think it's a bad sign when the website promoting this method considers it to be a last resort.

Ferberizing is quite straight forward: it requires putting her to bed awake and letting her scream, wail, stand up in her crib and hang out the door, clutch at your shirt as you put lay her back down, and work herself into utter exhaustion before finally falling asleep after a period ranging from 20 minutes to 2.5 hours. Sleep-baby-sleep.com recommends only to start trying this method during a week where you are feeling particularly strong-willed and don't require much sleep, because it usually takes a few days (or weeks, but who's counting) before the baby realizes that when you put her down in the crib she's not going to get out and she might as well sleep because it will pass the time faster until you finally come back to rescue her. Oh yeah, and if you crack under the pressure of the baby acting as though you have subjected her to the worst torture possible and making you feel like a horrible, abusive mother? It just gets harder.

Lucy is not a fan of Dr. Ferber, but I plan to win this one. She's asleep in her crib right now.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Jump Around

Lucy's new thing is jumping in her crib, something her daddy discovered. It's just as well she gets some use out of it - it's not like she sleeps in the thing. She'll pull herself up to standing on the bars and then really get to jumping. Those little legs can go! This video was taken a couple of weeks back and she's just gotten better since then. This baby's going to be climbing Katahdin this summer.