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!

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.

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.

Slam!

The other day, Lucy rolled into the bathroom in her walker and shut the door in my face. As the mother of a girl, I should get used to this happening on an increasingly regular basis, right? I mean, I never did it to my mother or anything, it's just what I've heard .....

Camp

Yesterday Lucy and I went north to spend just the day. We started the day in Millinocket to visit Great-great Aunt Harriett (in the nursing home) and Great-great Uncle Allistair, and then moved on to our family's camp, north of Millinocket and south of Baxter State Park. It's Lucy's third trip to camp; the last two were fall of last year. Since she is just now really starting to move around and figure her world out, I think the first two don't actually count.

For me it's always much less fun going up to camp first thing in the spring because it's cold and super buggy. Because of this, Lucy and I didn't really spend any time outside, though grandma took her out for a few minutes while I napped on the couch. :) Lucy mostly napped, motored around camp in her walker, ate, and played with Grandma and Grandpa. She obviously has no concept of camp yet, which I think is just as well. I'm hoping that camp can be as exciting and magical for her as a child as it was for me as a child, and I think that yesterday would have failed to capture that magic.

Last summer before Lucy was born, my cousin Ken was up at camp with his wife and two girls, around ages 12 and 10. Eric and I went up for the day to visit, and Ken was happy to see us because he said the girls were going crazy with boredom. Bored at camp? I'm sure I must have been bored at times as a child, but my memories of camp revolve around running in the woods, riding in the boat, playing on the rocks and in the water, and imagining anything was possible, including that the rocks on our shoreline were the rooms in my house. Will Erin and Tara look back on their visit and remember being bored and not liking camp? Or will they remember more fun than their dad thought they were having?

What was it about my time at camp that makes me remember it so fondly and how can I create that same sense of camp fun and happiness for Lucy?

Is She Hungry?

Lucy is apparently hungry. Really, anyone can see this baby is practically wasting away. Either that, or what I feed her tastes so much like cardboard she can't taste the difference.

In her walker she will go to our recycling bins and pull out something to chew on. Problem is, she's started to bite off pieces of the cardboard and actually eat them. Well, the other problem is last week I caught her going for a dog food can. Cardboard is one thing .... Gotta baby-proof this one real quick!

Say What?

No paparazzi please!