mischevious munchkin

So I realized a few days ago that it's been quite a while since I last wrote a real post. Truth is, I've been feeling a little blue lately. Not depressed blue - more like a spring-is-kicking-my-ass blue. Seriously, it happens every year. The weather gets all out of whack. One day it's warm and sunny; the next day it's snowing. The light changes. It seems to rain without warning. And I guess I'm what the Germans call "wetterfühlig," which means sensitive to the weather. My body goes on strike, and I get sluggish and moody or wired and unable to sleep. For some reason, this particular change of season always throws me for a loop, and it only seems to have gotten worse since I moved to Germany, where the weather is significantly more changeable than where I grew up. Seriously, in northern California, the weather - whether good or bad - tends to stick around for at least a week before really changing. In Berlin, on the other hand, I can never really be sure how to dress for the day, and this year has been no exception. The barometer and thermometer have been all over the place these past weeks, and they've dragged my body with them on their little roller-coaster ride. Anyway, so if I've been unreliable lately - if I haven't returned your call or email, if I forgot your birthday or said I'd call you soon and didn't - if I've been non-communicative in any way, I apologize. Now you know why. It's the weather's fault!

OK. Just kidding. It's my fault, but the weather hasn't been helping, is all I'm sayin'. Yanno?

Anyway, Marie is a little ball of fire. For the most part, her sleeping habits have gotten sooooo much better. She's been going to bed at a regular time for several weeks now, and although she's still far from "sleeping through the night," her stretches of uninterrupted sleep have been getting longer again. That being said, as soon as Toffi and I started feeling cocky about our new-found sleep bliss and dared to dream about tweaking her routine to finally get her to drop her third nap (which is really problematic in ways I won't bore you with now), it came back almost immediately to slap us in the face.

Yesterday, Marie took all of 2 naps, each of which was slightly less than 45 minutes. Just for comparison, she usually gets 3, and one of them is usually well over an hour. She was understandably cranky by the end of the day, so I shortened the whole bedtime routine and got her to sleep by shortly after 6pm, which is pretty early for her. I knew something wasn't quite right when I had to go in to her twice within the first two hours, but I was totally unprepared for what happened around 10 pm, when I went in at the sound of her voice for the third time. She was sitting up in bed, waving her arms, smiling and ready to play!

Granted, the fun only lasted about an hour because she clearly hadn't slept even close to enough and had no business being up at that time. But there was no way I was going to get her back to sleep, so I let her get up and play with us. By 11:30, she had turned into a little sleep-deprived monster. She wanted nothing more than to play, but since she was exhausted, she kept crying out in protest. Exactly what she was protesting, I know not, but I suspect she was just complaining that she felt like crap and didn't know why. The problem was that since her internal clock was all out of whack, I couldn't get her to relax either. We tried darkening the living room as I rocked her in my lap. She wasn't having it. Nursing was pointless too, since she kept nipping me. I took her back to bed, but even then, it took what felt like forever to get her to fall asleep again.

You'd think that after that circus of an evening, she would have conked out and slept most of the rest of the night without stirring. HA! As parents of babies inevitably learn, babies don't sleep well if they're sleep-deprived. So that means if they don't get their nap quota, their sleep that night will suck. Which means that their naps the next day won't be as restful either. And so the vicious cycle continues. The trick to breaking it? Search me, but eventually, something gives, and if the parents are persistent (in other words, have become zombies whose sole purpose is to get a small bundle of pure, vibrating energy to sleep at regular intervals), baby somehow gets back to normality. Whatever that is.

I digress. So Marie was up every friggin' hour last night, and by 6:30 this morning, there was no persuading her to stay in bed, so Toffi, knowing that I had slept even less than he had, got up with her. She took one super short nap around 9ish and then again at 1 pm in her stroller. The good news, though, is that she went to sleep at 7 this evening, slept for 3 hours, and went back to sleep without much fuss. Let's just hope last night was a fluke!

I will now stop rambling and leave you with two very short clips. The first is of Marie standing up and laughing mischievously with pride. It's an excellent example of this proud little chuckle of hers. Clearly, she's ready to conquer the world. The second one is of her playing with her carrot rattle, which she seems to call "ne-ne." Make sure the volume is on and enjoy!

yes, it's gotten better

I realized today that I haven't posted in a week and that my last post was after an extremely stressful night. Well, I don't want to jinx myself by saying this, but things got better 2 days later. Marie's back to something resembling a sleep schedule, and it involves actually sleeping several hours in a row. In fact, one day this week when Marie had been napping, Toffi and I heard some noises through the baby monitor. We assumed she had woken up and that the sound of her fussing would soon turn into crying, which is still the way she says, "Get your asses in here! You know damn well I don't wanna be alone!"

The crying never came.


We figured she must have gone back to sleep - or that maybe she hadn't really been awake to begin with.

Then we heard a high-pitched but totally happy-sounding, "Na, na, na!"

We went to the bedroom and opened the door. Marie was standing on our bed, playing with the cord to my reading lamp, which I had "hidden" behind the headboard. She turned her head to look at us and smiled, like, "Hey dudes, what's up?"

I guess we need to find a new place for my reading lamp.

exhausted

Marie, she is killing us. I suspect a growth spurt or something similar, 'cause this is ridiculous. She suddenly started eating MUCH larger portions at lunch and dinner time, but this hasn't led to a further reduction in how much she nurses. On the contrary, we nursed more often yesterday than we have in weeks. And last evening, a mere hour after I had put her to bed, Marie was up and at 'em, ready to play again. We gave up on getting her back to bed and let her explore the living room while we ate dinner and watched some TV. Then we all went to bed around 11ish, but I was up every damn hour to nurse her. At 6:40 this morning I just couldn't take it anymore and begged Toffi to get up with our little monster so that just once I could get more than 45 minutes sleep at a stretch. Marie needed to nurse again at 9, and then at 10, and at 11:30 she ate a lunch twice as large as what she was eating only 2 days ago. Toffi and I are like zombies today. So before I fall asleep at the keyboard, I'm going to make us some more coffee ...

cruisin' for a bruisin'

Marie is a cruiser. She spends all day pulling up on anything within reach and then cruising from one piece of furniture to another. Her crawl is adorable and kinda funny. Instead of crawling on hands and knees, she crawls on hands, one knee and one foot. It might sound lopsided and awkward, but she's fast! Basically, no matter where we set her down, we can be pretty sure she'll be somewhere completely different in less than a minute. One game we play is to set her down by the safety gate in our living room. Before we know it, she's pulled up on the couch:Then she sidles on down the couch to the glass table, from which she cruises on to the other couch and eventually to its end table, at which point we grab her and take her over to the safety gate, set her down, and watch the whole thing from the beginning.

Of course, she takes several spills a day. Some of them end in tears, wailing, and some scrapes and bruises, but most of the time she just takes it in stride. She's a tough cookie.

Being an Amazon woman is pretty hard work, though, so she still takes 3 naps a day...