We went in Wednesday for Lillian's weight check appointment and the doctor decided to turn it into her 6 month well baby visit.
Here are her 6 month (-1 week) stat's:

Weight: 12lbs, 9oz (< 5%)
Height: 24 3/4 (10-25%)
Head: 17 1/4 (75-90%)

So she gained 1lb in a month! The doctor was really pleased with her weight gain and said we should stay the course. She also said we could advance to Stage 2 food, which Lillian will be excited about because it will provide her some additional options at meal time.

And now a few picts from Wednesday...



A little sleep update:

Two steps forward, 1 step back.

Last night was kind of a bad night. Not compared to her waking up 6+ times like she did in our pre-ferber days, but compared to our new standard it wasn't great.

Fifth night intervals - 7, 9, 11

8:00 pm - Lillian went down without any tears.

8:30 pm - Lillian woke up, went in after her first interval, replaced the paci and she fell right asleep.

10:30 pm - Lillian woke up, went in after her first interval, replaced the paci and she fell back asleep

2:20 am - Lillian woke up, went in after her first interval, replaced the paci and she fell back asleep


4:45 - Lillian woke up. Checked on her at 7 minutes, 9 minutes and she fell asleep during her 11 minute interval. I was really tempted to just pick her up and put her in my bed because I was really tired. But I resisted and she finally fell back asleep.
 
A couple of things I've noticed:
- Lilllin seems to sleep better on her stomach. I may just start putting her down that way because half the flailing around seems to be her trying to get onto her stomach when she wakes up on her back.
- I recently started putting her in Pampers Dry Max diapers to go to bed. I think these keep her drier and I wonder if the fussiness last night related to her being put to bed in her normal Pampers Swaddlers.
- I need to get a normal sound machine because I think the sleep sheep turning off isn't helping matters. Ferber actually would probably say to eliminate things like a sound machine, but we usually keep her door cracked and the sound echos in the house too much to not have something on in her room.
- I need to get a night light for her room because leaving the bathroom light on puts too much light in the room, but its pitch black if we don't have anything on and I can't see when I go in an sooth her.
 
I promise I won't keep these updates going for too much longer. It's just helpful for me to be able to look back and see how we've progressed.

Forth night intervals were 6, 8, 10 minutes.

Lillian went down at 7:45pm without any tears. She stirred a few times through out the night but only fussed a bit and went back to sleep a few minutes after she woke.

4:30 - After the 6 minute interval, I went in & put in her paci. She went straight back to bed.

6:20 - woke up for the day.

Only one real night time waking is a HUGE improvement!! I'm so hopeful we will be sleeping through the night soon!

3rd night intervals were: 5, 7, 9 minutes

Lillian missed her normal last afternoon nap, so it was a fight to keep her up until 8pm. My husband bathed her and fed her a bottle around 7:45 and she was sound asleep in bed by 8pm. No crying at all.

She stirred at 2:10 am but put herself back to sleep before we reached the end of the first interval. She never really cried, more like half awake, half asleep fussing.

4:00 am - She woke up. I went in after 6 minutes. I gave her, her pacifier and she fell back asleep.

6:00am - Woke up for the day.

So another big step forward. I'm hopefully we'll get a full night sleep sometime in the next week.

Night two went pretty well. I put Lillian down around 8:30pm since that seemed to work the night before. She'd taken a nap from 5:45-6:30pm, so I figured that was a good bedtime. Because we did 3,5,7 minute intervals Wednesday night, we had to increase the length of the intervals to 4,6,8 minutes for Thursday night.

So our night looked like this:

8:30pm - put her in bed, and checked on her at 4 minutes, 6 minutes and then she fell asleep 2 minutes into her 3rd interval.

2:30 - woke up. Checked on her at 4 minutes and then she fell asleep 4 minutes into her 2nd interval.

4:30 - woke up. Checked on her at 4 mins, 6, mins, 8 min and then she fell asleep around 5 minutes into her 4th interval. This one was tricky because we were creeping close to 5am and I wasn't sure if I should just get her up. If she'd made it to minute 8 of her forth interval I probably would have, but she finally fell back asleep.

6:30am - I went in and woke her up to start her day.

So she still woke up twice, but had a long stretch from 8:30-2:30, so that's progress in the right direction. Ferber says that its important that both parents participate in the sleep training, so my husband took the night time wakings last night. Of course he woke me up because he couldn't remember what intervals he was supposed to be using so I didn't get much continuous sleep, but hopefully we're on track to get some soon!

I know this is a very controversial topic, but I thought I would blog about it to give people a 1st hand experience. When researching the ferber method, I couldn't really find a lot of people talking about what their experience with it was. So here's our story...

Lillian started sleeping through the night around 3 months. It was the most wonderful thing in the world. Unfortunately around 4 months, she started waking up again. This coincided with us starting to pack up the old house, so we figured she would get better once we got settled in the new house. At first, she was just waking up once a night, then it was twice a night... and then everything just went to hell. For the last 3 weeks she's been waking up 4-6 times a night. Sometime she was hungry. Sometime she wasn't. Sometimes she could be consoled back to sleep quickly, sometimes she couldn't. Its been a nightmare. I mean seriously. I'm extremely sleep deprived and getting more depressed with each sleepless night. I bought the ferber book a few weeks again because I didn't know what else to do. I read it and it seemed to make sense, but then Lillian got a cold so I didn't want to try it while she already wasn't feeling well.

We had planned to try this weekend, but I decided on the fly to start last night. Lillian went to bed around 8:00pm, and woke up at 8:30 totally inconsolable. Nothing I could do was calming her down so I figured screw it, let's give this thing a try.... so our night looked like this:


8:45 - put her in the bed since she was screaming her head off already. Checked her at following intervals: 3 min, 5 min, 7 min and then she fell asleep at 7 mins (right before I was going to go in).

10:15 - woke up. checked her at the following intervals: 3 min, 5 min, and then she fell asleep at 4 mins

4:15 - woke up. Checked on her at the following intervals: 3 min, 5 min, 7 min, and then she fell asleep at 6 mins. When I went in at 3mins her diaper was really wet so I changed her diaper. While changing the diaper I noticed her feet were cold so I put some socks on her feet before I put her jammies back on. This was probably the hardest waking because she usually eats around this time. But I don't think she needs to eat for nutritional purposes, rather for comfort, so I decided to skip the feeding.

6:30am - went in to wake her up to go to work/daycare. She was still pretty sleepy but when she woke up she was her normal smiley self.

It was really hard to listen to her cry (i turned down the sound on our video monitor down but we share a wall), but overall waking up just 3 times was a HUGE improvement for us. Hopefully we'll continue to improve tonight!  I couldn't fall back asleep after her 4:15 waking for about an hour so I'm still pretty tired, but I feel hopeful that this will get the whole house back on track.

I've begun the process of weaning Lillian. It has been definitely harder on me than her because to be honest I think she prefers to eat from a bottle because she can see everything going on. (Have I ever mentioned how noisy my child is? She has to check everyone and everything out). After her doctors appointment about the weight issue, I started supplementing with Earth's Best Organic formula. I was so worried she wouldn't take it, but she took it with out any problem with no breastmilk added. Once I saw that I gave up pumping. I figured as long as she still nursed when we are together, she could take formula when we weren't. I still had a pretty good freezer stash I've been sending 2 formula bottles and one breastmilk bottle to day care. She usually nurses when she wakes up in the morning and when we get home from work. She prefers a bottle before bed, so right now 3 feedings are breastmilk and 3 are formula. Once the freezer stash runs out, which should be in about a week, she'll just get breastmilk in the morning and around 5pm. We have a trip planned in the beginning of August without her, so I guess I'll drop those last two feeding then. It makes me sad to stop nursing, but I am kind of excited to get my body back to myself and be able to focus on dropping the rest of my baby & IF weight. I have 12lbs of baby weight and 20lbs of IF weight that I'd like to loose before my sister's wedding in November.

Of course as soon as I cut back on the nursing, Lillian got her first cold. ::insert mommy guilt here:: It was going to happen eventually, but I still like its my fault. To make it worse, I got her cold (probably because she's been sleeping next to me every night because she's so darn cranky). I can't take hardly anything because I am breastfeeding still and Lillian can't take anything because she is too little. I feel the worst for her because it has definitely moved into her chest and she keeps waking herself up at night coughing. I swear we are never going to sleep through the night again. We've been using the humidifier around the clock, and sitting in a hot shower with her, but nothing seems to really do the trick. Hopefully it will go away soon.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Two posts in one day, I know you can't believe it. But I'm home with a stuffed up little girl, so I figured I'd try to catch up on the 100 posts I have in my head...

I can't believe Lillian is 5 months old already! Its amazing to see how much she is growing and developing. Here are a few picts Joey took on her 5 monthday!

So I finally got around to taking some picts of the new house! The downstairs is pretty much done, but we still have some work to do on getting the bedrooms upstairs finished. The bed I ordered from Restoration Hardware in October is FINALLY getting delivered next week, and once that is here I can start getting the master bedroom together. So for now enjoy some picts of the downstairs...

So things have been super crazy in our house recently.

Last Wednesday we had our follow up appointment with the pediatric pulmonologist regarding Lillian's reflux. She had started breathing funny again, so I was interested to see what he would say. After briefly examining her, he decided we would put her on Zantac for the reflux to see if that would help. But then as we started talking a bit more, he realized how small she is for her age. After an few calculations, he decided that Lillian should have gained double what she had between our last appointment and this one. He said that he thought I needed to follow up with my Pediatrician immediately. He actually used the words "failure to thrive".

So of course I flipped out. I mean who wants to be scared like that. I had asked my pediatrician at her 4 month appointment 3 weeks earlier if I should be concerned about her lack of weight gain and he said she was fine, so I was frustrated that I now had another doctor freaking out about her weight gain. So I decided to go see another pediatrician in the same practice. The Dr I had been seeing previously didn't seem to really listen to me or to Lillian. He told me twice that her breathing was fine (which was obviously not the case) and didn't seem to care about her weight gain even though she's steadily been losing ground (percentage wise) on the growth charts. So I called the practice and made an appointment with the female doctor in the practice. I had heard good things about her previously, but she only works part time which is why I was hesitant to use her from the start.

So Thursday afternoon, Lillian and I went to see the pediatrician. It was a great appointment. She really took her time with us and listened to my concerns and listened to Lillian's breathing. She actually disagrees with the pulmonologist that she has reflux but said to keep her on the zantac just in case. She thought she has something else (a name I can't pronounce or remember) but said it was something she would grow out of. In the mean time she laid out a good plan for Lillian's weight gain. She wanted us to decrease the rice cereal intake because she thought Lillian was getting too full on it and not on breast milk, and she wanted us to make sure Lillian is getting around 30 oz per day, which is a big jump from the roughly 24 oz she has been getting. She wanted us to try to bottle feed her as often as possible so we could be sure how many ounces she was getting. Since I don't produce 30 oz per day (or at least not that the pump can get) this meant we had to introduce formula. I have been feeling very conflicted about having to give her formula but that is a whole other post. Never the less we put the plan in action this weekend and Lillian seems to be liking it. She took the formula with out batting an eye.

I hope everyone had a great 4th. We spent the weekend at home relaxing, and yesterday we went over to a friends house for a little swimming... Here are some picts from the 4th!