Time to wake up!

Ivy is really coming alive these past few days, waking up more and more, and starting to interact with us and her world rather than sleeping 22 hours a day... As with most developments in the world of parenting, this can be a good or a bad thing. Good when its 3pm and I have nothing else to do for an hour than snuggle and tickle and look at the alert, kicking baby. Bad when that same alert, kicking baby is also grunting and fussing and it happens to be 2am. Sigh.

While Ivy is far from being on any sort of schedule, she is seeming to develop some patterns. One is that charming awake period that falls, for about 2 hours, between 11pm and 3am. She is getting pretty endearing when she's quietly alert but during that night-time jag she seems to invariably have some pretty interesting things going on with her digestive system and will squawk and grunt and fuss and cry until she finally works out a few burps and a good poop. Then, finally, she'll relax. Can't complain too much as, after 3am, she is regularly giving us 4-6 hour stretches of sleep, as long as she's in bed with us. I believe she WANTS to be asleep at night, she's such a good girl... her tummy is just getting in the way.

Her daytime routine is more varied and includes a number of periods of time wherein she lays peacefully, silently asleep on her back in the pack and play, causing us to continually repeat the phrase "Why can't she sleep like this at night??" She's now working in 1-3 nice awake hours, too. We aren't quite sure what to do with her during those times, but luckily she's not picky and seems to get as much out of looking at the inside wall of the moses basket as she does being looked at and cooed at by us. She's really a pretty easy kid.


In other news, we had a busy day of outings yesterday. We started off the morning (a glorious, splendidly sunny morning!) with a family trip to the Hessler Street Fair. Nice way to start the day, looking at booths-of-crap with the hippies. We only had to pull back into the driveway two times for things we forgot. I think we're gradually getting better at this family-of-four thing. Well, five, really, as we took the dog with us. As always the dog got more comments than the baby. To her credit the baby was under a cover for most of the walk-- we were very hard core and did not use strollers-- we each wore a kid, Jack in the backpack and Ivy in the sling. We had a lovely time, finishing the morning with a picnic and fountain play in a lovely green on the Case campus.

Then I took the kids to the West side and gave Nat the afternoon off. We took Ivy and Jack to visit Bill and then had a nice time chatting with Ariel, Steve, and baby Leira who came to visit my mom. It was a lovely day of visiting but I must say I've gotten rather used to the afternoon nap that I missed yesterday...