Nursing-Friendly Tuesday: Good-to-Go Cardi

I would love advice here, as I don’t have the time/bandwidth to read any more books on baby sleep.

The baby is 4.5 months old. I would day a decent sleeper. She has hit the point where she can’t sleep anywhere anymore, and so we’ve been focusing for the past 2 weeks on really getting a regular bedtime routine, getting naps in, etc. We are at the point where we have a bedtime routine, she goes to sleep at 7-7:30, we can generally get her to nap every 3 hours or so and are improving the number of naps that last 50 minutes or longer.

BUT she cannot yet self soothe well. Sometimes she will self-soothe when she wakes at night (she sleeps with us, so we can hear the rustling/chatting to herself/fist sucking/farting), but can’t get herself back to sleep when she wakes up 30 minutes into her nap or an hour or so after falling asleep at night. To fall asleep initially, she is addicted to the b**b (or crazy bouncing by her dad, when I’m not there) to actually fall asleep. We can’t just put her into bed “drowsy but awake”)–she has to nod off while nursing or being bounced. Obviously, this is something we’d like to remedy for her sleep and our sanity.

We’re not yet ready to do CIO or similar (maybe we’d consider it in a couple of months). Ideas? Someone on this s i t e suggested the website Precious Little Sleep, which had a lot of good advice. One thing she suggests is not feeding right before sleep, and substituting a swing for nursing or parents bouncing right before bed–the idea is that the baby learns to fall asleep by herself in the swing, and then is gradually weaned off of the swing. On one hand, I’d love to try this strategy and the advice has been on point for us so far (we happen to have lots of space for a swing next to her crib in our room, and I don’t care about cost at this point). On the other hand, doesn’t it seem silly to start putting a baby in a swing to sleep, then weaning her off the swing in a few months’ time, rather than just working it out with the crib? FWIW, we’ve started actually putting her in the Rock ‘n Play rather than the crib for naps, hoping the vibrations help her, and it may have worked a bit.

Thoughts? Sorry for rambling. I’m sleepy ;)

So, on advice of The Hive, I got Mrs. Patel’s bars and milk water tea. The bars (sampler) are SOOOOO good! But the tea… tastes just awful! I have tried a variety of ratios and steeping time… am I doing something wrong? PS – I am not sure I’ve seen an increase in my supply as a result but I do have to say those bars are dang tasty.

My 11 year old daughter is in dance–an expensive extra curricular–and I was thinking about cutting back her classes to focus on a few of her favorites. It seems like a critical age where either the kids start to take off and get really involved, or they decide it isn’t what they like and they quit. FWIW, my daughter loves it.

At last week’s recital, I complained to my mom about the costs and how ridiculous it was. She’s a retired high school teacher and said something surprising to me: “At least these parents know where their girls are. It may be worth it to pay and have her in a safe studio rather than running around with friends.”

Now I’m looking at the studio in a totally different way. Should I suck it up and invest, not because she’s going to go on and be a professional dancer, but because it’s giving her a safe place to hang out after school?