What a week!

This has been quite a week in the world of Emily!  Actually, I guess it's been a little over a week, so we'll start with two days after Christmas.  On the 27th, Lucas's parents came down from Ohio to see Emily (and us.)  We had a wonderful visit with them and were so glad they were able to come down for a visit.  We had our family Christmas with them and Abby and Chuck as well as some fun family dinners and a little shopping, too.  Unfortunately, Emily chose this week to become a fussy baby, which had never been the case before.  I felt terrible because his parents get so little time with her that we want it to be good when they get it.  We're still not sure what the problem was, but we think it was a combination of things.  Regardless, she's pretty much back to normal now.

Their visit just happened to coincide with our plan to begin sleep training Emily.   We were expecting it to be fairly easy because she's been sleeping through the night in her bassinet since seven weeks.  We hadn't, however, been very good with napping.  Mostly we just let her nap on us because we could.  I knew that her sitter would be getting her into a napping routine that worked for her schedule, so I didn't worry about it.  However, when we decided to put her in her crib at night, we decided to start putting her down for naps, too.  The crib at night worked beautifully.  The crib at nap time, not so much.  So, we were weaklings and nixed the crib naptimes after a couple days.  She would only sleep 20-30 minutes in the crib, whereas she'd sleep two hours or more on us.

After four nights in her crib, she had a rough night where she didn't want to go down.  Of course, that was NYE and we were having a party, so I guess she probably just wanted to stay up with us.  We got her to sleep about 1:00 and she slept great.  The next night, she went to bed fine.  On Monday night, however, she decided she no longer wanted to be in her crib.  Granted, we were certainly not following any of the sleep training rules.  We were waiting until she was asleep to put her down, which isn't really what is recommended.  For the next three nights, she woke up and started screaming every time I tried to lay her down.  She even screamed when I put her in her bassinet.  Keep in mind, this was the same method I'd used every night since she was seven weeks old.  So after several nights of screaming and very little sleep, we decided to get a little bit informed on sleep training, put her in her crib, and just suck it up and deal with however much screaming and crying we had to endure.  In the midst of these few terrible nights, we also started Emily with her babysitter who we absolutely love. Emmy was great for her, but she was definitely exhausted due to the lack of sleep.

The plan was to give her a bath, nurse her, wake her up if she fell asleep, swaddle her, use hot towels to warm up her crib mattress, remove them, put her down in the bed with a pacifer while she was fully awake, but a little bit sleepy, sing her a song, say goodnight, and walk out.  We also had a night light, a humidifier, and an awesome white noise iPad app that was making a fan sound.  That sounds like alot, but it really wasn't that bad.  We hoped with the perfect environment, she would go right to sleep, but we didn't really expect it to work.  She hated swaddling in the past, but it was working beautifully for the sitter, so we thought we'd give it a try.  We followed our plan perfectly.  She spit out the paci and talked to herself for about ten minutes, then fell asleep!  We absolutely could not believe it.  She slept from 8:45 to 4:00 this morning.  At 4:00, I got her out of the bed and put her in with us for the last hour before I had to get up.  She actually slept until I woke her up at 5:45 for her to eat.  Tonight, we followed the same routine.  She started to fuss when I swaddled her, but was fine by the time I put her down.  Again, she was great.  She spit out the paci and I went back in and gave it to her again.  She fell asleep in about five minutes or so.  Let's hope she sleeps through the night tonight, too!  If she wakes up, my plan is to re-swaddle her and put her back down with the paci.  I hope I won't have to resort to that plan!

In the last couple weeks, she has also started rolling quite a bit more.  Although her first rollover was very early- barely over a month- she has hardly rolled at all for the past few months.  Now, though, she rolls over pretty quickly whenever you put her on her tummy.  She can also roll from back to front, but doesn't do it quite as often.  I'm constantly surprised at how strong she is.  She can almost bring herself to sit up from laying flat on her back.  She just needs a little help by holding onto my fingers as she does it.  She can even go from sitting to standing on her own as long as she's holding my fingers.  She loves to stand up and does it all the time- holding on to us, of course.  Her hands are constantly in her mouth and we're sure teeth aren't too far off.  We gave her rice cereal for the first time on January 3rd, which she loved.  She ate about one tablespoon (three tablespoons or so prepared) for three days, but we decided not to give it to her anymore as those three days were also the three days she wouldn't sleep.  We will try to re-introduce it later. 

Things are trucking right along and we are loving life with our little Emmylou!