Sitting & Sleeping

Over the last week, Violet learned to sit up on her own! I went in to get her up from her nap last Tuesday and she was sitting in her crib with a big smile. Since then she has practiced a lot and is becoming more and more mobile by the day. She likes to get onto her hands and knees and bounce, and we suspect she will start crawling soon.


We also started sleep training last week. I had just started reading Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems by Dr. Richard Ferber and the very first example he gave described our problems with Violet perfectly. Apparently she had some less than ideal sleep associations we needed to break, like being held by her momma in order to get to sleep. So we are working on teaching her to fall asleep on her own. The first night, she cried for 25 minutes before going to sleep. The second night, she only cried for 7 minutes. Some nights she'll go to sleep without crying at all. One of the other associations we had to break was how she liked to hold my hair while she fell asleep. We found her a small doll with yarn hair to replace me and now she sleeps holding Dora's hair. And when she wakes up in the night, we just give her Dora, pull her blanket back up, and she generally goes back to sleep on her own. I was amazed at how quickly her sleep improved, which makes life easier for all the rest of us, too.