FGH

Sleep, finally.

Fiona is just about three weeks shy of her first birthday and I'm happy to report that last night was the first night she slept through completely.

Sleep has always been the sticking point with Fiona. She's otherwise a perfect baby -- calm, happy, easy to get along with and loves to travel. But she's never been good at sleeping. The first six or seven months were tough on us -- even with switching off baby wake up duties still meant we got a maximum of 3 hours of sleep between interruptions. There were loads of nighttime feedings, rockings, and sometimes hourly attempts to get her back to sleep. We instituted the nighttime rituals very early on, so that helped matters from the 8PM-midnight realm, but it wasn't until recently that we finally got the midnight-6am sleep to stick.

We've been working on it for about a month now, first by cutting back the nightly feedings and instead just giving a pacifier. Then we kept her in her crib as much as possible, so no co-sleeping or feedings in our bed. The Ferber stuff where you let her cry it out never really worked and we could never commit to ignoring her for five minutes, but she's getting pretty good at calming herself down after a few seconds. Most recently, her solid food has gone up and I think tanking her up at dinner each night has greatly helped.

There are a lot of good basic sleep tips out there but different things work with different babies. I'm just glad we finally figured it out for Fiona.

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We have this musical piano toy that has five keys you can mash to make sounds. You can't do much, but it plays little midi tunes and can be played like a five note piano. When it sits idle, it will do a few chimes every 15 minutes or so to remind the baby it is still on.

Today I witnessed Fiona madly crawling across the floor towards a pair of shoes and when the piano did a few chimes, she paused for a moment mid-crawl, sidetracked a few feet over to the piano, mashed 3 or 4 keys, then continued crawling towards the shoes -- almost out of a sense of duty.

Alphababy

Alphababy is a great mac app for infants. It clears off the desktop and shields the rest of your system from any harm. When you hit any key, a shape is shown (either a symbol or the key being pressed, or optionally, a photograph) and a sound is made (you can turn it off). If you've got a powerbook with a tough metal keyboard or an extra keyboard for your desktop mac, you can freely let your baby bang away. It only took a few sessions with alphababy before Fiona knew what to expect and now every time she sees my computer, she wants to play.

Nine months

Fiona surpassed nine months old the other day. She's rolling over like a champ, standing against objects, and almost getting to the point of crawling. Once she is mobile, everything will change and I have a feeling watching her will be a lot more work (no more plopping her down with a few toys and doing something else nearby). I've heard from friends that mobile babies are a lot happier but she's fairly content as it is.

She's flying

Grab, put in mouth

All smiles

Big head

Fiona looks good in dark colors

upside down

Fiona shoutout

I could explain why strangers in Chicago drew this for Fiona at a bar while meeting up as part of one of my websites, but really, it would take too long.

...the alien

Fixated on...

Two months

Fiona's most popular nicknames this month:

- sweetpea
- poop poop
- juicebox
- pooper
- burpmaster2000

Still growing like a weed, Fiona's over 11 pounds and outgrowing all her 0-3 months clothing. She's slept 4-5 hours a couple nights in the past week, so we're getting closer to the day she sleeps through the night. She's getting good at smiling and being talkative as well. Aside from an occasional crankiness due to intestinal gas, she's been a very quiet and happy baby.

FGH