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Sleep
Dear ear infections, you suck.
Last night Lily woke up crying again. We tried the hug & a book approach but this time it didn’t work. She’d go down for short periods of time, but then she’d be backup and crying.
We then tried to let her sleep with us, but that wasn’t working well either. She’s sleep for maybe 30 minutes, then be up just bawling. 9pm turned into 11, 11 into 1am and things kept going the same.
Finally around what was probably 2am, our 30 minute stints turned into an hour and we all got a few hours of sleep. However not nearly enough.
Sometimes all we need is a hug and a story.
For some reason, Lily has been waking up shortly after going to bed recently. Then she breaks down and just cries. She gets all worked up and it’s so sad. Not to mention very out of the ordinary.
After a little while, we go in and give her a hug. Then we sit down and read a story. After a few minutes, she calms down and then we can usually put her back to bed. This time for the night.
Not sure what’s going on, but a hug and a good book seem to do the trick.
There is no style like comfortable.
One great thing about little kids is that they are comfortable being who they are.
They don’t care about what they wear, how they look to others or if they seem to be doing everything a little odd.
As long as they are comfortable, they are good to go.
For example, this is Lily taking a nap the other day.
Lily Napping
She was sound asleep, on her back, at the end of the crib, with her feet hanging out one end and her hands the other.
Somehow this is comfortable. 
Changing Up The Schedule
One thing about little ones is that they like their schedule, and so do we.
We know when they’re going to get up, when they’re going to go to bed and when they’ll eat. However, now I’m looking at changing that.
It won’t be a big change, but since I have a new job, I’d like to leave a half hour earlier to deal with traffic. That means one little girl will need to be up a half hour earlier.
I figure it’s not that big of deal as she’s usually making noises for a good half hour before she gets up most mornings.
Testing out SleepSacks with feet.
While at the store the other day, we noticed that SleepSacks now come with feet. It’s a way of allowing your little one to run around with a sleep sack on and, when it’s time for bed, you just put their little feet back into the SleepSack. So we bought one.
We’ve had it for a few weeks now and it’s working out quite nice. Lily can run around in it and doesn’t have to worry about falling flat on her face like with regular SleepSacks. When it’s time for bed, I pull her little feet out of the feet holes and she’s in a SleepSack. Her feet stay nice and warm too, just like they should.
Sleeping in the dark.
The Dark
Last Thursday, Lily slept her first night in the dark. She didn’t mean to though.
You see, we have a night light that we turn on whenever she goes to bed. However, Dad forgot to turn it on. It wasn’t until she was fast asleep, and we were going to bed ourselves, that we noticed. It was too late then and just let her be.
Lily didn’t notice she was sleeping in the dark and didn’t care one bit.
Come to find out, the nightlight is more for us than for her right now. When we peek into her room, we can’t see her if the nightlight is off. Oops.
When can we start putting blankets on our baby?
Where is Lily?
We were told from day one that blankets couldn’t go in the crib for safety reasons. Of course, if Lily was swaddled in a smaller receiving blanket, than that was ok.
The sad thing is, we got lots of nice blankets for shower gifts and even home-made ones! They’ve been used, but never for sleeping.
So when is it ok to put a blanket in the crib?
Lily is old enough, and smart enough, that a blanket shouldn’t cause any safety issues. At least I don’t think so. If she doesn’t want it, she’d just toss it out of the crib. Of course, then she’d wake us up to come get it so she could do it again. 
Letting them cry themselves to sleep really works?!
Sleepy Kitten
There is a lot of advice that comes and goes. Some is easy to do while others sounds like the worst thing ever.
Like when we were told to lay Lily down and just let herself cry herself to sleep. If we did this, she’d eventually allow us to put her to bed, while awake, and she’d just lie down and go to sleep.
First off, that’s to good to believe. We’ve spent a year rocking her to sleep and taking anywhere from 30 minuets to 2 hours fighting with her to get to sleep. Now you’re telling me we can just put her down, walk away and all will be good?
Overnight diapers help stop Lily from waking up at night.
Last week I wrote about how Lily was waking up at 4:30am. We thought it might be because her diaper was getting too full so we got ourselves some overnight diapers.
She still wakes with a really full diaper, but it’s not like her pjs are wet. And since we started using them, we’ve only had one night where she woke up 2am and I think that was due to something different.
If you’ve got a baby who’s starting to wake up way too early in the morning, try some overnight diapers and see if they help. They worked wonders for us.
It’s hard to update the daddy blog when someone gets up at 4:30am.
You may have noticed that my posts have been few and far between lately. It seems that Lily has gotten into a habit of not wanting to go to bed easily, and then getting up at 4:30 in the morning.
This leaves Dad taking care of Lily instead of perusing the internet and writing blog posts.
I’m hoping this is just a phase and it’ll soon pass like all others.
We’re thinking she’s waking up early because her diaper is over full and she becomes uncomfortable. Then once she’s up, she likes to stay up.
