Life Variations

Lately, I feel like I'm stuck in a big mixing bowl or something.  We'll have a week of good days, then one day that just puts me over the edge, and gets me all frustrated.  Here's what I mean...

Julia is 6 weeks, 2 days old today.  For a good week or more, we had GREAT days.  She was eating every 2-3 hours during the day, and 3-4 hours at night.  Now, while for many people that may not seem like a great trade off, it's better than every 2 hours at night!!!  It sometimes takes her 45-60 minutes to eat, on a 2 hour schedule (up until she was 4 weeks old), that leaves about 45 minutes for me to grab some shut eye before she's up to eat again.  On a 3 hour schedule, an hour, almost 2, and when she goes 4 hours... 3. hours. of. sleep!  Praise God!

So anyways...we had been on this schedule for a couple of weeks.  I would feed her between 8 and 9 pm, a full feeding session, and would put her down to sleep.  She would sleep until 12 or 1 am, get up and nurse a full session again, and go back down for a couple more hours.  It was nice!  Most nights, she wouldn't be up for the day until about 6 or 7 am.  Yeah, I complained about being tired, but I really shouldn't.  Some women have colicky babies that don't sleep, or babies that have their days and nights completely mixed up.  I really am truly blessed to have such an "easy" baby.

Then...we have nights like Monday night.  All day, her eating was erratic.  She would eat anywhere from 1 hour to 3 hours apart, and no matter how hard I tried, she would NOT nurse more than 5-8 minutes.  She slept all day except for about 2 hours (most of which was first thing in the morning).  Now, before you go and say "well, that's why you had a bad night", she was doing this a LOT.  She would sleep all day except for being fed, AND all night!  Anywho...back to the bad night.  I decided that when she turned 6 weeks, I wanted to start implementing a nighttime routine.  It consists of a bath, change diaper, change clothes, nurse, go to bed.  I'm going to add in a bed time story eventually, but I want to start it out simple.  We got all of the bath stuff out around 7:30 so we could bathe her at 8.  Well...we had to wake her up before her bath.  Michael got her stripped down and brought her to me.  She generally likes her baths, but her patience runs short close to the end.  We went about finishing her new routine, and she went to sleep...only to wake up about an hour and a half later, wanting to eat.  She ate every.two.hours.  We haven't done that in 2 weeks!!!  I was EXHAUSTED to say the least, and by 2:30 am, she decided it was time to get up for the day.  Wow...ok... so here we are, I'm going on about 2 hours of sleep...IF I'M LUCKY...it's now 5:30 am or so, and I'm now up with my 6 week old daughter.  Michael didn't have to go to work until later in the morning, so I was able to catch a quick 30 minute nap before he left, and Julia was actually asleep.  Yesterday was a LOOOONG day to say the least.

I decided about half way through the day that I was going to start trying to keep her awake in the evening, in hopes of better sleep at night.  I was thinking a little over-ambitiously at first, and was going to keep her awake from 2:00 until bedtime.  That quickly changed to 5.  I can't imagine trying to keep her awake for 6+ hours!  So...5:00 rolled around, I woke her up and started playing with her, tickling her, talking to her, etc.  I wanted to get out and work in the flower bed last night too, so when the first intermission in the Wings game rolled around, Michael and I took Julia outside and pulled some weeds!  When we got back in, I got a bowl of warm water and a wash cloth, gave her a quick wipe down, changed her diaper, put her in her jammies, and headed upstairs to nurse her.  She nursed a full session, and was in bed - asleep - by 8:30.  Why she ate again at 10, I will never know...but she nursed another full session, went back down, and slept until 2!  I got her up, nursed her, changed her, put her back to bed, and she didn't wake up again until 5:45.  Wahoo!  Good night!!!  Let's see if it happens again tonight!

Sigh...here's hoping.  =)