One In the Oven: A Busy Few Days

Today it's back to work for Brandon and I, back to the CDC for Kate, and back into the crate for Copper after the four of us spent a long weekend together. It was so nice to get to spend three days at home with the Bean and the pup, and boy!, were they a busy few days! Lots of things have been happening at the Snyder house as our little lady continues to grow and learn new things. Here's some of what's been going on...

~ Kate's been sleeping through the night! Or rather, Kate had been sleeping through the night! See bullet #2...

~ Kate's been sleeping in her room! I'd like to say in her crib, but that isn't entirely true. Let me back up for a second. First, as previously mentioned, Kate started sleeping through the night. After much trial and error, we seem to have worked out a bedtime routine, and perfected the timing necessary for the completion of said routine, that helped to put our little bugger into Dreamland for the entire night. We usually dunk Kate in the bath tub between 6:00 and 6:30, complete with a full beauty regiment courtesy of Johnson and Johnson Bedtime Bath, Wash and Lotion (I do love the smell of baby, but I love the smell of baby-ready-for-bed just a little more!), and some singing, then hang out for a bit before giving her her nighttime bottle. This happens in her room with the lights dimmed while the sound machine fills the room with the soothing sound of falling rain. Once the bottles finished we swaddle her up, rock her a bit, and she's down for the count. Hopefully. But lately it's been working. That is, until we started putting her into her crib. We finally decided (and when I say we, understand that I just mean me. Brandon's been trying to convince me to do this for weeks and I've been holding out. But because we're a team, he gets lumped into the baby-stays-in-our-room category) that it was time for Kate to move out of the bassinet in our bedroom and into the crib in her room. To start this transition, we began laying her in the pack n play at night. This went surprisingly well, and Kate slept peacefully and through the night there, resulting in bullet #1. The next logical step was to move her into her room. And this, to date, has not gone as well. Our little wiggle bug somehow manages, several times a night, to squirm her way directly into the corner and mash her face into the wooden bars. This of course, wakes her up, and results in her needing to be moved back into the center of the mattress. So it seems that we traded in sleeping through the night in favor of Kate sleeping in her own room. We'll continue to chip away at figuring out how to get it all to come together. In the meantime, we've discovered that if we put Kate in the bassinet in her room she sleeps through the night. Kind of the best of both worlds, but kind of cheating, since she's still not in the crib. But hey, baby steps, right?

~ We heard our first baby giggle! It was nearly the best sound I've ever heard, second only to her crying when she was born. She hasn't quite mastered the skill enough to do it all the time, but it has happened and she's oh-so-close to doing it regularly. The story of her first laugh is actually kind of cool (and yes, I probably feel that way because I'm a new momma and she's my kiddo and I think everything she does is kind of cool, but humor me). Friday afternoon I left work and went to pick up the Bean at the CDC. I was chatting with the two girls who work in her room, Aimee and Naomi, while I gathered up her things and got her ready to leave. Aimee asked me if we had any plans for the weekend, to which I replied that my goal was to get Kate to laugh. For days she'd been teasing me with it, smiling big smiles and looking like she was going to give me a giggle. When we dropped her off at daycare on the first day I told the girls that I didn't want to know if she met a milestone (even though I know it will happen, I don't want to feel like I'm missing out on things while I'm at work. Can you say DENIAL??) and mentioned that I thought she was going to laugh soon. So, needless to say, this was a highly anticipated event. A few minutes after admitting that I was going to launch Operation Baby Giggle, I was putting Kate into her car seat and chatting at her (I'd like to say with her, but we all know that conversation was a little one-sided) and I said "Are you ready to go home and play?". Of course, this wasn't spoken as a regular question, but with the singsong-y voice I often adopt when speaking to her. And wouldn't you know it, the little peanut looked right at me, flashed me a huge, toothless grin, and laughed. That's right. She laughed. Audibly and with witnesses! You would have thought I'd won the lottery! I jumped up and started waving my arms and cheering, kind of like those idiots do on the Price Is Right. I was so excited! Aimee and Naomi couldn't believe that she did it, and frankly, neither could I! It was like she didn't want to spend the weekend watching me clowning around in an effort to get that first little laugh out of her, so she gave it up early. And then she did it again! The girls promised she hadn't done it earlier, and I think I might believe them because it took two days to get her to do it again and she hasn't done it since. I tell myself that this is evidence that she hasn't exactly mastered the skill yet, and that means that I really did get to witness the first time. I was so excited for Brandon to have the chance to hear it too that when we got home I could hardly contain myself. I didn't want to tell him what had happened, I wanted him to experience it. So I walked around like a dweeb with a big grin on my face. Finally he said "Why are you being weird? Did she laugh?" and I spilled the beans. It took her until the following evening to do it again, but it was so worth the wait. And this time Brandon got to hear. She hasn't done it again but I know it's coming, and I can't wait until her little giggles fill up the house. This was definitely the highlight of my weekend...in fact, I'm smiling a big, dorky smile just thinking about it! As soon as she gets the hang of it, I'll post a video :-)

~ Kate is three months old! Saturday marked three months since our little one entered the world. We took some pictures and marveled at how big she's getting, how much she's doing, and how our lives have changed since she joined our family. We did our monthly photo shoot and had a much more cooperative baby than we did for the two month pics. She's so bright eyed and alert and fun to interact with.

~ The newborn clothes are mostly retired. I feel that I need to follow this up with a sad-face emoticon. :-(

Even though I know she's going to grow, and that means that we're doing things right, I'm still a teensy bit sad when I have to retire another outfit. Soon I'll be packing up all of the newborn clothes and moving them out of the closet to make room for the 3 month outfits that we've slowly been phasing in. The newborn pants are getting to be too short, and the sleeves on the shirts don't come down nearly far enough, but she's still a little small for the 3 month clothes. I'm happy it'll be a while before I have to pack away another set of outfits, and I'm loving dressing her in all of her new clothes, even though it makes me a teeny bit misty :-)