well, it didn’t take long. ellie has been sleeping in her crib for about a month now and we had been waiting for when she might start exploring her surroundings some. we put her down the other night and heard her screaming around 4 a.m. she eventually calmed down for the rest of the night and woke around 6 a.m. like usual, but with a twist: she had somehow turned completely around, with her feet where her head would normally be.

we don’t know if she got so angry at 4 a.m. that she twisted all around, but somehow she managed to do it. now we’ll wait for her to be standing up against the railing waiting for us in he morning. i think we’ll have a bit longer to wait for that, but who knows, maybe she’ll surprise us.

it wasn’t pretty, but the north (mommy) finally prevailed over the smaller, but feisty, south (ellie) in the lack civil war, otherwise known as the naptime battle royal.

i suppose you could say the war began on january 12, 2009, her birthday, because nothing has really ever come easily for us with this little girl, but of all things, naptime proved to be one of the more frustrating. part of me feels like ellie’s unwillingness to go down for naps without being held, rocked and bounced until she fell asleep and was in her swing reminded bryn of how things were for us early on, which was horrible!

but, ever since we hit three months of age things have gotten easier by the day, but this naptime thing brought both of us, mostly bryn, back to the days when crying and fussiness was just as common an occurrence as feeding the baby a bottle (read: often!). there were many battles as we headed down the road of breaking ellie’s habit of sleeping with bryn and needing all of the coaxing. nighttime proved a lot easier than the daytime. she’d literally go down in 30 minutes or less (now much faster), but those naps would always result in a battle. and like two soldiers meeting on the field, the girls squared off. sometimes it would last 30 minutes. sometimes it would last an hour or more, but one thing was for sure, ellie wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

in the end persistence paid off. after trying to teach ellie to nap on her own in her crip for about a week, she started taking to it much better and now, for the most part, goes down just as easily as she does at night. sometimes we’ll creep in there if she’s been quiet for a bit and peer over the railing of the crib to find her staring at her bumper, clearly on her way to sleep, but still fighting it. that’s my stubborn girl. :)

at the end of day, i’m describing this, but i didn’t do this, bryn did. it’s a huge accomplishment for her and a big milestone for ellie, so here’s a virtual standing ovation for the north … i mean, mommy. great job.

“so much more makes sense now, and i don’t know if there is any other way i could have gained this type of insight into life. and i think this is what a lot of us are talking about when we say it feels like we were let into a secret club, a club we didn’t know existed until we got here, like we had no idea there was this much to know until our children showed it all to us.” -heather armstrong