Back to Celeste

Okay, after last night's digression about beans, I need to offer up at least one Celeste story (and a picture).

The biggest thing for us right now is her sleep cycle. She's still a wee thing, feeding on demand and sleeping in between, but she does have some long wake periods. The trick for us has been trying to figure out how to deal with that sleep:wake ratio. We aren't trying to force her onto a schedule and sleeping or not sleeping through the night isn't a real problem at this point (well, Evelin might disagree, especially at 5:30 in the morning), but we were having an issue where Celeste didn't want to sleep if she wasn't being held.

Evelin blames the grandmothers who spent a lot of time holding Celeste when they spent their respective weeks with us after I went back to work. Plus I would spend a lot of time holding the sleeping baby when I got home from work.

No more.

The edict came down on Wednesday. Tuesday night had been a particularly rough one, so Evelin did some reading and googling and deciding and now when Celeste starts to get drowsy, she has to go into her crib. If she wakes up we can retrieve her, but otherwise sleepy Celeste goes in the crib. (Obviously, if she falls asleep in the carseat or stroller, we don't have to head home to get her into the crib, but no more naps on daddy during a ballgame.)

Wednesday night worked out pretty well. She was feeding when I got home and decided to be up for a while afterwards. We watched the first hour of the BoSox game and then switched over to the debate. (The game stayed live on MLB Gameday, which kept me from flipping back and forth.) Every 20 to 30 minutes, I'd have to run upstairs to put Celeste into her crib, and then return five minutes later to pick her back up, but in general it worked. After the debate, we switched back to the game and Celeste decided to go down for good late in the 8th. Other than waking up a bit after midnight, sometime around 3:00 a.m. and again as I was getting ready for work, she spent the rest of the night in the crib.

Last night it was similar. A bit of awake time playing on her playmat, some hanging out on the couch reading (mostly Shel Silverstein, but I did just get the new translation of Don Quixote, so maybe we'll see how she likes Cervantes some other time), and then to bed. There were fewer waking periods (probably because Celeste knew the Sox had a travel day) and that held true over night. She did have a very wet diaper around 5:00 a.m. that got her a bit fussy — and it didn't help that a sleepy set of parents didn't think to check the diaper until the third bout of complaining — but otherwise it was a fairly straightforward night with one late night feeding, one middle of the night feeding, and waking up when I was getting ready to go to work.

Of course, since I'm blogging this, tonight (and the weekend) will lead to all sorts of sleep changes and probably not for the best. There should be a <knock wood> tag in HTML ...