Milestones

We realized last night that Elizabeth has well and truly outgrown some of my favourite t-shirts of hers. The arms are three inches too short and we barely got the snaps done up.

I decided to try her on a bit of cottage cheese this morning. In spite of the fact that my favourite baby book suggests it around 9 months, I'd never tried it, mostly because I never had it in the house until I started this diet. So she and I ate almost identical breakfasts of blueberries and cottage cheese. She added cheerios and milk to that, and I added tea with Splenda. She loved it. She ate it with her spoon for a while, and when that got old, picked up individual curds with her fingers. I got several comments of, "Yum, yum."

She has learned to stack blocks, without consistently knocking over the previous blocks. She's up to three at a time now. (This, BTW, is accurate to 95%, 17 times out of 20.)

Life is good, when there's a toddler around to make it interesting. (Probably at other times too, but this is the one most applicable to me at the moment.)

Santa Claus in toddlerspeak

I have in my possession a little tray depicting a very Victorian Santa. Having used it recently for something, it was in the dishwasher when I went to unload same this morning.

Elizabeth picked it up, looked at it closely for a second, and then smiled and showed it to me. "Opa," she said. I laughed, and she said it again. "Opa, Opa." She was, apparently, quite pleased with the discovery of Opa on one of our dishes.

Now, my father-in-law is sixty-one, with a long, white beard and white hair, bald on top. He has a nice, round belly on him. He has spent two Christmas seasons now as the definitive Santa - the one on all the promotions - at the Cataraqui Mall in Kingston. In other words, Elizabeth was right. Her Opa is, in fact, Santa Claus. We even have pictures of an eith-month-old Elizabeth, dressed up, sitting on Santa's lap in our own living room. I probably have the only child in history who didn't have a moment's fear at meeting Santa for the first time; to her, he was just Opa.

more sleepytime blues

Okay, I'm at the end of my rope.

My daughter takes 45 minutes to go to sleep. This happens at naptime, and it happens every night. We rock her, we lay down with her on our bed, we walk with her, and no matter what we do, it takes forever for her to fall asleep.

My mom tells me that with one of us, she thinks it was my youngest sister, they eventually had to do the cry-it-out thing. It took just over an hour for Heather to get to sleep. Each night it got less, until finally she went to sleep almost immediately.

The books have several different methods, but the ones we've tried either didn't work at the time, or seemed too painful. We tried one that a friend at church suggested, where you rock the baby until she's just barely this side of sleep, then put her down. If she wakes, you let her cry a minute or so, then you go in and rock her again until she stops crying and is sleepy. The theory is that you don't want to teach a child that their cries will not be answered, but neither do you want to rock them right to sleep for the rest of their lives. We tried it, and it wasn't bad, but it didn't speed things up at all. The crying-out didn't work at six months, though we haven't given it a serious effort since.

Experienced parents, please weigh in on this one: am I spoiling my daughter by rocking her all the way to sleep, all the time? And what can we do to reclaim our evenings from the toddler with an 11:00 bedtime, self-set?

Help!

More Funny Stuff for Parents

( The_Newborn_Connection:__The_Ins_and_Outs_of_In_and_Out )

Crying it Out

( Cut_For_Protection_of_the_faint_of_heart )