Category: Updates about Sylvia

Sept. 18: Things are going much better in our home.  On Tuesday evening, I started Sylvie on her antibiotics.  She had a much better night than the previous three, and yesterday, she seemed like she was pretty much back to her normal, chipper self.  In fact, seeing her beaming smile sort of surprised me.  Amidst all the crying and the night-waking, I’d sort of forgotten how happy she normally is!
She’s drinking down her medicine well, and she’s seeming like she’s no longer in pain.  Good things!  Sylvie’s smile is like the sunshine, and it feels good after some very cloudy days.

So the last several days have been kinda hard.  Sylvia has been a sad, sad girl, especially at night.  After she cried for several hours this morning, I made a doctor’s appointment for her.  We discovered an infected left ear.  So my baby girl has an ear infection.

I debated whether to give her antibiotics, and decided that she’s been unhappy enough that it’s a good idea to treat it.  These days, doctors are starting to recommend that mild ear infections not be treated because of the gross overuse of antibiotics.  Sylvie’s doctor characterized her ear infection as moderate.  If you’re interested, Mayo Clinic, and Dr. Greene have articles about the use of antibiotics for treating ear infections.

Hopefully she’ll start feeling better soon.

In other news, Sylvia waved for the first time today.  She waved bye-bye to her dad this morning and to the receptionist at the clinic this afternoon.  What a big girl!

Sept. 14: Sylvia had her seven-month appointment on Friday.  Actually, it was her six-month appointment, but we’re a little off-schedule because of our health-insurance change.  She’s getting to be a big girl!  She weighed in at 16 lbs, measured 27″ long, and has a head circumference of 44.8 cm.
This morning, I think she did her first successful crawling motions.  She’s been rocking on all fours for weeks, doing the plank and push-up positions for a while too, but until this morning, she hadn’t moved her knees forward.  Several times this morning, she moved a knee forward while reaching with the opposite hand.  And in the last few days, she’s beginning to move (mostly by oozing or schooching on her tummy).  It’s only a matter of time until she takes over the world.  And her brother’s toys.  That’s where she wants to go!

Sept. 8: Sylvia is eating lots of non-milk items these days.  It’s such fun to introduce food to a new little person!  We gave her her first meal back in late July.  She’s now eating (in pureed form) bananas, applesauce, pear sauce, peaches (and tiny bits of peach), peas, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe bits, rice cereal, and lots of cheerios.  In fact, cheerios are my new way of distracting an unhappy baby.  Pop one in her open mouth, and she often stops crying:)
She’s also recently discovered how to get her feet in her mouth (as demonstrated in the photo to the right).  Sometimes I have a hard time getting her diaper on because she won’t remove her toes from her mouth.  Mmmmm.  They are so yummy!

Aug. 21: Sylvia is working on her second nap of the day.  Which is a really good thing because I was getting desperate about having her nap.  After teething and being sick, she somehow got herself to a place where she was only napping once…maybe twice in the morning for an hour or so.  By the evening, she’s been an exhausted mess.  And even when I work all afternoon to get her to fall asleep, I really haven’t been that successful.
Yesterday afternoon I went over to day-care Karen’s house to help her by watching her kids for the afternoon while she moved her mom into a nursing home.  Before leaving, Karen put the two little boys down for a nap.  She did it by picking them up, walking them upstairs to their cribs, saying goodnight, laying them down with their pacifiers and blankets, and walking away.  There was no fussing or crying.  And the boys both slept for two and a half hours.  It made me feel like something in my world needs to change!

Karen and I didn’t always see eye to eye on child-raising techniques.  She organizes the kids in a very structured way.  They seem to thrive on the consistency, but I never found it practical to be all that scheduled and organized at home.  Karen really wanted me to track how often I was feeding Andrew, to space out his feedings, to not nurse him to sleep, to let him cry himself back to sleep when he woke from a nap too early, to not ever skip naps because we were out, to only use the pacifier when he was sleeping, etc.

I didn’t necessarily appreciate Karen’s advice.  I think that I was happy to work with her, but I didn’t really like feeling like she was telling me how to raise my child.  Especially when the advice she was giving me sometimes felt like it was designed to make her life easier at the expense of Andrew’s happiness (don’t hold him all the time, let him cry sometimes, don’t nurse him whenever he wants…).

Karen had encouraged me to read a book called Babywise by Gary Ezzo, which is sort of the antithesis of attachment parenting.  The goals seems to be to get your child to sleep through the night, which always seemed to me to be a sort of silly goal.  My ultimate goal is to have children who feel loved and content.  Who are happy and healthy and who have a strong sense that the world is a warm and loving place.  If that meant waking up in the night to feed or comfort them, that’s just fine with me!  Dr. Sears and Dr. Brazelton are two of the attachment parenting gurus whom I most identify with.  I found them both myself, and Mom later told me that they were two of the parenting resources that she also admired.  Attachment parenting includes child-led breastfeeding, lots of baby-wearing, co-sleeping, and generally being very attuned to your baby’s needs.  It’s an approach that for the most part, feels very right to me.

Now that Sylvia is six-months-old, I find myself expecting a little more out of her than I did when she was a newborn.  She can self-soothe, and her needs aren’t as raw as they were.  In fact, “need” is shifting to “want” in a lot of cases.  So I’m feeling more confident about pushing her a little to help her gain some independence.

So while I was at Karen’s yesterday, I re-read the somewhat abhorred Babywise.  And while I really, really don’t like the fact that he is promoting the strict scheduling of itty-bitty babies, I did find wisdom in his suggestions of how organizing feeding time, wake time and nap time into 3-4 hour repeating segments can work well for babies and parents.  So here are some things I’ve decided to try:

• I’m going to work to organize Sylvia’s eating, wake, and nap times more.  I generally just follow her cues, but the last few weeks, that hasn’t been leading to good naps.  Plus she’s recently up for hours in the night too!  So for the most part, I plan to feed her after she wakes up and then wait 2-3 hours before feeding her again.  I’m also planning to not nurse her before bed to see if that helps her be able to fall back asleep better.
• I’ve decided (with some trepidation) to let Sylvia cry herself to sleep if necessary.  I’ve only let her cry for about 5 minutes or maybe 10, and she’s never fallen asleep…I go in after a while and nurse her down.  I let her cry for both naps so far today.  I set the timer for 15 minutes and gritted my teeth.  The first nap she cried for about 20 minutes, but after the timer went off at 15 minutes, she sounded like she was heading toward sleep so I didn’t go in.  Then for this second nap, she cried for about 10 minutes.  It wasn’t so bad.
• I’m going to wait until she wakes up happy to go in to get her. Sylvia often wakes up crying after 45 minutes-one hour of napping.  From experience with Andrew, I know that a baby who wakes crying probably wasn’t ready to get up, but with Sylvia, once I go in to soothe her, she makes it very clear that she’s wide awake and is not going to return to napping anytime soon.  So in order to encourage longer naps, I’m going to let her cry herself back to sleep.  [There’s always the chance that she’ll have a poopy diaper or something, so I’ll have to figure out how to manage this one.] Oh, how odd…she just woke up crying.  Hmmm…  To check on her or not to check.  It’s so hard when she’s calling for me and expects me to come.  But she needs to sleep more.  Sleep is very important for babies.  Hey, she just stopped.  My hope is that she’ll wake up coo-ing when she wakes rested.  urg.  she’s crying again.

So that’s my plan. I’ll let you know how it goes.  Hopefully longer, more consistent naps will make for a happier Sylvia and a calmer Mom.  Wish us luck!

Aug. 14: Sylvia has a delicious laugh. And her big brother has the magic key to unleash the giggles. Here’s a video that’s sure to make you smile.

Aug. 14: When I was at Bryan’s parent’s house, I took pictures of some of the pictures of Melanie when she was little.  I think she looks a lot like Sylvia.  You be the judge.  Do Andrew and Sylvia not look a whole lot like little Bryan and Melanie?  See the pics here!

July 30: Ouch!  Teething just doesn’t seem like a fun activity.  Sylvie cut her second tooth (bottom left) yesterday while we were flying home from Texas.  She’s generally in good spirits, but she’s having a hard time sleeping, and I’ve been keeping her dosed up on Tylenol these past days to ensure a somewhat happy girl.  I’m appreciating these last days of her sweet, toothless grin.

July 23:  Sylvia’s been working the teething thing a lot recently…chomping hard on knuckles and about anything else she can get in her mouth.  Last night I thought I could see the white of a tooth just under the skin, and this afternoon, it appears to have cut through!
Oh dear, my baby is soon to have a toothy smile instead of a gummy grin.  I’ll need to get some good final gum shots of her before that tooth pushes up and becomes visible!
Way to go, Sylvia!

July 16: Sylvia is five months old now.  Hard to believe!  Andrew was five months old around Thanksgiving of ’05.  I still think that they look a lot like each other.
So here’s a snapshot of some of the cute things that our little girl is up to these days.

• She’s smiling.  A LOT.  With her big gummy grin.
• She’s rolling…mostly from back to front.  But she’s very good at it.
• She loves to fall asleep by rubbing a soft blanket on her face.  And sucking on her paci.
• She wakes up two to three times a night.  Sometimes more…and that’s no fun.  Sometimes just twice.  She goes to bed around 8 and usually wakes at 12, 2, 4, and then 6 am starts the day.
• Around the end of June (so when she was about 4 1/2 months), she stopped crying/singing when in her car seat.  It was around the time she was getting better at grasping toys.  The difference in my life has been notable.  Going places is so much less stressful!  Now crying in the car is not nearly so common.
• She’s also been doing great in the bike trailer.  We’ve done several rides in the last week, and the only time she really got crying was when Big Brother bit her finger.  Not sure what he was thinking there…it didn’t seem to be maliciously intended.  She started screaming so I stopped the bike and went to pick her up, wondering if the sun got in her eyes or if her tummy hurt her, and Andrew said cheerfully, “I bit her, Mommy!”  Sure enough…teeth marks on her finger.  Anyway, that’s another story.
• When Sylvia is on her tummy, she often pushes up with her arms so she can get a good look around the room.  It’s a really cute pose.
• She’s also working on sitting up.  She can reach out in front or to the side to balance herself (sometimes), but she needs someone ready to catch her at all times!
• Sylvia thus far is not so in to books.  She does like faces, and she’s been reacting strongly to the books I just got her with photos of baby faces.  However, the reaction is fiercely screeching.
• Over the weekend, she started adding the “D” sound into her vocabulary.  She does a lot of “aahhh” and “ooohhhh” “ooooo”  “ggaaaahhh” “gooooo” normally, but “daaahhhh” and “doooo” and “ah da ah da” is new.  She say it a lot.  Especially AH DAH.
• She’s got a great laugh.  And she laughs most of all for her beloved brother.  He can make her laugh in a second.  My assessment is that she’s over the moon about him.  And he about her.  And he’s working on being gentle.  Babies are so cute, sometimes it’s hard not to want to pinch and squeeze and nibble upon them.  At least I think so!

~A