Amelie is 10 months old!

Well, here I am typing because I have 14 minutes before picking Alia up from Montessori and Amelie is down for a nap. Let's talk about Amelie!

Amelie points. Amelie giggles. And Amelie crawls----fast. She feeds herself puffs and Cheerios with her little dimpled fingers. And given any opportunity, she pulls to a standing position. In fact, I've even helped her to balance and let go and watched in amazement while she stood for 2 seconds before realizing it.

And sleep? weeeeell....let's just say we're hopeful. At this moment, Amelie has pushed 6 little teeth through some very agitated little gums, and for the moment (i.e., the last two nights), we've had an honest night's sleep. But the nights before that? We were up at 11, 1, 3, 4, 6. You get the idea. These have been some very tired days. And the funny thing is that every day I'm becoming more experienced as a Mommy of two babies, and yet I don't feel too much more confident that I know the real reasons why we're having sleep problems. Could be teeth? yep. Could be a phase? yep. Could be hungry because her teeth hurt and she doesn't like eating on those days? yep. Could be a disruption in sleep pattern and overall sleep confusion? yep. So my answer to all this is to treat it like jet lag and try to retrain her on when she should be sleeping and for how long. I started this two days ago and knock wood, it's working. See, since she wasn't sleeping well at night, she'd want to take a two hour morning nap. So I'd let her seeing that she was exhausted. But then she refused to take any meaningful afternoon nap at all. Thirty minutes was a gift. And you know what? Reflecting back to Alia at the same age, she wanted to do the exact same thing. Which is not what you want when it means that they're so exhausted by 6PM that they're spinning and then basically too tired to sleep by the time it's bedtime. So. I limit Amelie's a.m. nap to an hour and fifteen minutes. She goes down at 10:15 and we wake her up at 11:30. Then she's good until she goes down again at 3. This time I let her sleep as long as she wants to, which is usually and hour and a half or two hours. And something amazing happened. By shortening that morning nap by a simple fifteen minutes, she sleeps in the afternoon! She sleeps at night! Her sleep is better distributed over the 24 hour day. So that's where we are. At the moment anyway. Who knows, maybe the 3rd day is a charm or maybe the 3rd day isn't.

Amelie's favorite things are watching Alia, her Noisy Farm book, Alia's Froggy,  the Moo, Baaaa, La La La book, going Costco and any other store where people admire her, and riding in the shopping cart. Amelie loves her new big girl car seat that allows her to see out---who knew that there were rear-facing car seats that convert to a toddler seat?! Okay, well, I knew this, but I never really understood the benefit before...but that's a whole different blog for another day. Amelie also loves to go to toddler soccer on Sundays and watch all those silly big kids chasing the soccer ball. And last night had to be the best thing ever for Amelie....getting in tub with Alia. Oh, and I almost forgot the most important favorite....Amelie is craaaaaazy about her new nanny!