Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Sleeping, Again

Sandy here:

So, we haven't written about sleep in a while. At least in our opinion, sleep became the most important thing to figure out. I mean, you can live for a while without food (besides, isn't that what Wendy's is for?) and showering and reading and socializing, but sleep? For the first few months, Doug and I would obsess about sleep -- ours and the babies. The girls had a few reflux issues and got some bad colds this winter so the jiggly chairs turned out to be at the perfect angle for their little digestive systems and noses. Well, this was all great, but we knew we would need to get them back in the crib. We made the transition almost a month ago (right around the time Tava started doing this) and it's been funny, to say the least. We put them down parallel to each other and parallel to the short sides of the crib (can you tell I'm a math teacher?). Tava is always on the left as you're looking in the crib (Analee's right).

Inevitably, when we go in to get them in the morning, this is what we find:





In fact, some nights Analee has woken up because Tava woke up and started kicking her in the face. Analee deals with this all pretty well though, I think she thinks of it as her "big sister" duty to put up with Tava. For a long time, all Analee would do when we put her to sleep was raise her arms up in a "don't shoot me, I give up" gesture. Now, she's taking cues from her sister:



Some of you might be wondering why we don't just separate them into their own cribs. One night we tried putting them on opposite ends of the crib (since we only have one crib set up right now) and we had potentially the worst night of sleep EVER from Tava -- she was so upset and couldn't get settled. As soon as she fell asleep, she would wake up and be upset again. We speculate that it's because she wasn't touching her sister (and while she's very good at scooching around in a circle, actual forward or backward motion still eludes her), and I just don't have the heart to make her so upset again so soon. Analee is learning the meaning of "sacrifice for the greater good."

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