August 10, 2009 - Progress

Grace's sleep schedule is not quite "there" yet, but we are working on it. She goes to bed without crying or any other sleep aid (music, rocking, nightlight), but she still wakes up pretty often. She usually goes back to sleep within 10 minutes with some comfort (no picking up or feeding) but occasionally she screams for an extended period of time. Usually at that point I will feed her, figuring that if she wasn't hungry she would go back to sleep like the other times. We are trying to get to at least 8 hours before she eats (so sometime between 3 and 5 am), and it seems to work...although we really have no idea what time she'll be up in the morning after that feeding. We are still settling in to a nap/sleep schedule (we started bed time between 8:30 and 9 but for the last 2 nights she has been so tired that she has gone to sleep at 7), but Grace does communicate well and we are following her lead.

In the feeding department, Grace has been eating two meals a day of rice cereal (with breast milk) for the last few days and tomorrow she will eat pureed carrots (also with breast milk) for breakfast for the first time. I am thinking that my next career might be baby food chef, assuming Grace likes it. I really liked making food for her and look forward to pureeing other vegetables and fruit in the future.

Another type of progress we've made in the last week is that Kristoffer is now participating in feeding Grace. He is much better than I am at getting her to eat without holding the spoon or putting fingers in her mouth (contrary to the 2nd picture below), and I think they both like having something new that they are doing together.

Because of the drought in Kenya we have scheduled power outages every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday (all day!). This continues to be very frustrating since we pay to live on a compound with a generator and our landlord will not turn the generator on until 5 pm. While we have no power tomorrow, I will be hosting my first "mom's group" at our house because our usual cafe is closed for renovation. I am looking forward to having some moms and babies over for the afternoon.

LMW