This last month has been a lot about trying to establish a good eating & sleeping routine.
Feeding:
Most days, Stella has 40 - 60ml of milk & her baby rice for breakfast with a cube of puree pear (to sweeten the porridge & to keep her tummy going)
Lunch & Dinner: A cube and a half of veggie mix & sometimes a bit of pear / apple / prune puree for pudding :)
Sleep:
Stella was going to bed between 7 and 8pm and then waking up at 10pm, 12am, somewhere between 2-3am, and 5am. I felt like a zombie. Geoff and I started YouTube-ing possible solutions & found Dana Obleman's posts. We changed Stella's bed-time routine to not include a feed & we started including a story! So now we go (around 7pm): Feed - Bath - Massage - Story (in bed) - Sleep
Wake up between 1 and 2 for a feed... and then wake up again between 5 and 6am.
...it turns out all we had to do was to break her milk-sleep association and allow her to find her own way of falling asleep! (We never let her cry on her own). It's not perfect ever night, but it is such a relief to have cut out most wake-ups on most nights & feel a bit more human during the day.
The good news is that she seems to have settled into a day-time sleeping routine of around an hour in the morning somewhere between 9 and 11.. and another hour or so in the afternoon around 3pm.
From my side: I have a ton of work to get through so there's a constant battle to catch a gap to do work during Stella's nap time. We have lovely Lindsay who comes on Mondays & Thursdays to help me make sense of the house & to play with Stella while I get some work done....
I'm craving creativity... I have been baking quite a bit (mostly rusks for our morning tea)..and I have covered a few little clips with fabric for her to wear in her hair. I'm still working on Stella's baby crochet blanket... 40 or so to go & I can stitch them together...... at this rate I'll miss the baby-phase & make it big enough so she can put it on her bed!!!!
We've taken to calling her 'Chooksie' > this comes from 'Schnoeken-Poeksie' which became 'Schnoeken-Chooksie' and then got simplified to 'Chooksie'
Here is the last month's photo update:
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| Our morning ritual with Stella includes tummy & mirror time |
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| At Geoff's shop: Stella becomes a part of Geoff's 'market' table on the pavement :) |
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| Hot Summer's days call for water bucket time! |
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| PERFECT evening at Noordhoek Beach |
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| Stella has just discovered that she loves to tug on my hair... |
..and we've had more than a few Kommetjie walks:
On Sunday the 26th Feb, Geoff, Stella and I had breakfast at Chartfield with Nanny and Bampa, T'Neal, Dave and Gracie for Bampa's birthday....It was here that Stella enjoyed her first apple wedge! (I've given her puree apple before, but it's the first time she's eaten a wedge).... I gave her a bit of banana about a week later & she loved it, but she got sick about 10mins later so I'll wait another few weeks before trying it again.
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| Our little Chooksie started sucking her fingers a couple of weeks back... the same two as her auntie (Chickabee) but Stella sucks fingers on her left hand. |
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| We bought Stella her first books this past week... Most are only meant for babies over 1 year, but she really enjoys playing with the pages! Here she is with 'Bob the Fish' |
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| LOTS of love for Stella! xxx |
