I am postponing the blog about Barcelona a little longer to share all of the changes in Grace's life in just the last two days.
Let's start with Monday...
When Kristoffer came home from work on Monday (we were all still exhausted from a long trip home from Spain on Sunday) Grace was happy to help him put together her new Scandinavian high chair, imported from Denmark by way of Barcelona. Thank you to Farmor and Hans for giving Grace her special chair.
Once the chair was put together, we let her sit in it while we ate dinner to get used to being at our level at the table and in her chair. She also has a special place mat with a plastic table top to it from her Onkel Rasmus, Tante Jytte, and her cousins Josefine and Nikoline. As you can see below, Grace loves her new chair and really liked sitting up at the big table with us.
We let her play with a plastic bowl and one of her spoons to get ready for more things to come!
She even tried to eat her table top!
On Monday night after Grace's big evening with her new chair, we started "sleep training". In hindsight, we should have done this 2 months ago but with all of the travel and change for her we didn't want to try it until we were going to be home and settled for awhile. Grace has been waking up to eat almost every 2 hours during the night for the last month so both she and I were very ready for this. Kristoffer read a book about how to do it and I used some info from the "What to Expect the First Year" book. We came up with what we want her bedtime routine to be and we gave it our best shot.
Before starting her bedtime routine, we agreed that she would start sleeping in her own room so Kristoffer moved her crib out of our bedroom. This was the hardest part of it all for me - not having her in our room for the first time. Although I had been advocating for this move since she was 3 months (knowing in my head that is good for all of us), it was the first time I've slept "far away" from her since she was born and it made me a bit sad that my little baby is so big now. But enough about me...
Starting at 8 pm we did the following with Grace: bath, eating in rocking chair, quiet play time on the mat in her room with music (2-3 songs), reading in her rocking chair, put her down to sleep with her soft doll (thank you to Auntie Meghan and Molly). Our plan was to let her cry for 1 minute then go in and soothe her without picking her up, then wait 3 minutes and soothe her, then wait 5 minutes and soothe her, and keep doing 5 minutes until she went to sleep. Lucky for us, it only took 25 minutes before she fell asleep (okay, so maybe we held at 4 minutes instead of 5, but we were good and didn't pick her up).
She woke up two times during the night and we did the same procedure; each time it took 20-25 minutes for her to go to sleep. Then when she woke up at 6 am I fed her and she went back to sleep until 8:30 am. All in all, a successful first night of sleep training for all of us. Even though she woke up a few times, it was the most consecutive hours of sleep I have had since she was 2 months old!
Grace also had a good morning nap on Tuesday and 3 small cat naps in the afternoon. I think once she is sleeping through the night completely we can get her naps on a good schedule too (like for example right now it is 10am and she is napping, just as she did yesterday).
Now moving on to Tuesday...
(note: the reason Grace is wearing the same clothes both days is because it is cold here now and not that sunny so the laundry from Monday was not dry for Tuesday and she only had one long sleeve onesie and one pair of pants to wear that fit her and were not wet or stuck in the washing machine during our day-long power outage!)
Grace sat in her chair again with me when I ate breakfast and lunch during the day so that she would continue getting used to it; then at our dinner time last night she put on her special bib from Farmor and Hans, and she ate her first solid food! I use the term "solid food" loosely, because really there is nothing solid about rice cereal for babies mixed with breast milk! We took a lot of video which might take me forever to post (given the power shortages and slow internet speed here) but below are some of the still shots of Grace's first eating experience. She kept trying to hold the spoon and when I gave her a different spoon to hold she wanted to keep that one in her mouth while eating off of the spoon I had. She also liked to keep her fingers in her mouth at the same time. She was clearly very happy with the rice cereal. About three quarters of the way through the meal she indicated that she didn't want anymore by not looking at and trying to grab the spoon, looking away from me and towards Kristoffer, and keeping her mouth closed. It was a very positive experience for all of us.
We were so proud of and happy for Grace, and we feel we did this at the perfect time: she was ready for it and so were we with no more changes or travel in her life for awhile. In my case this happiness was also mixed with a little bit of sadness that the "weaning" process has begun and she will no longer eat from me alone. But of course this is a good milestone in her development regardless of my issues with having a baby grow so quickly.
Following her first meal, we had night #2 of "sleep training". After her bedtime routine Grace went to sleep within 10 minutes. She did wake up a few more times during the night than last time, but went back to sleep within 10 minutes again...until 4:30. After almost an hour of not falling back asleep we decided that she really must be hungry so at 5:30 she ate again and then slept straight through until 8:30 this morning. Again, we feel that "sleep training" is going well and hope that within the next two nights she'll make even more progress. We also apologize in advance to Jean and Jen - who arrive tonight from NYC to visit us and Kenya for the next 3 weeks - for timing Grace's "sleep training" with their visit...we hope she doesn't keep you up too much while you are here!
We'll keep you posted on how eating and sleeping continue to progress, but after two nights of not feeding Grace every two hours I already feel like a new person and she seems to be adjusting to her new schedule really well. We are very lucky to have such a great little girl!
LMW
My personal favorite of the gifts she got is a book called:
It is the story of a girl who dares to ask "Where are the girls?!" when her teacher puts up a poster of all the American presidents. You can imagine the school election that follows as Grace learns about how one gets to be president. You can also imagine the outcome of that school election. It is a GREAT book, especially for our Grace (when she becomes president I am sure there will be some scandal about how she wasn't born in the USA but I do have documentation to prove that she is eligible.).
