Sleep baby...

This past weekend was a bit weird for our family when it comes to getting much needed sleep. Ada decided she wasn't going to take naps as she normally does, and that threw us all off. We also crammed a lot into one weekend - cards and dinner with friends, nanny interviews, lunch with more friends, lunch with family and a two hour drive on each end of it, brunch with other friends, a long walk including shoe shopping, some yoga and even a bit of the bears game on our snow covered TV with crummy rabbit ear reception. Whew! I guess that's a lot of eating - and amazingly we missed dinner Saturday night as we both crashed at 7 pm for a "nap" that took us until 5 am. Hmmmm...

Part of the reason for the lack of schedule is Ada teething, and the other theory I have is that she really wants to take one big nap nowadays instead of two. I'm not seeing how this is going to work out but we'll see. She was pretty good on Friday as far as naps go, but Saturday she skipped the afternoon nap to meet the nanny candidates -- we interviewed two and liked them both. Hopefully we'll secure one of them today. Woohoo. But boy is that a reason for me to lack sleep. Anyone who thinks finding a nanny isn't stressful is nuts --So after Ada fussed the four times we tried to get her to take a nap, I finally broke down and that's when we headed out for a 2 hour walk. She napped for 20 minutes. It turns out she isn't much of a stroller napper. Then she slept well overnight, but was up at 5 am. After drinking and playing in our bed for a bit, Rick finally got her back into bed at 7:30 am for an hour and a half nap.

She enjoyed a celebratory brunch with friends who got engaged oh about 8 months ago... and really loved sucking on and biting the spoon. When one dropped, she was lucky to have it quickly substituted with another as there were 10 of us at the table and plenty of clean spoons to go around. Then for the drive out west 2 hours, we had to first refill her tank with milk and do the ever so fun diaper change in the front seat of our tiny civic with her on my lap and daddy doing the quick change. On the road to Oregon, IL, we didn't sleep at all and finally had a major breakdown 15 minutes from our destination. We stopped for a quick feeding that turned into a 15 minute glug fest and was fought with much screaming when it was time to get back into the car seat. Since Mom's bag of tricks was empty, the remainder of the trip was less than pleasant. Upon arriving, the baby was fussy, mommy was crabby, daddy was glad to have a big beer, and after feeding, changing, rocking, and cuddling, the baby finally took a 45 minute nap.

As the sun started dropping on the horizon, we loaded up for the ride home. And to those people who think you just stick a baby in the car and poof they pass out--liars! My kid doesn't like to sleep in the car. At most she'll give us a half hour stint but in the four hours we were driving this weekend, she didn't give us 5 minutes. Frustrating.

And speaking of the little angel, it's 9 am on Monday and she is finally deciding she should maybe get up. She didn't go down until 8 pm last night but that was the last we heard of her. 13 hours ago! Yep, we have a real sleeper. Thank goodness.

Moral of the story: Cross your fingers for a good sleeper if you plan to have kids, and do everything you can to help make their sleep schedule work. You'll have a much happier baby in the long run.