A, G, and E: 46 Weeks!

Eliza is getting closer and closer to her big birthday. For now, I'm still in denial, but in reality it's hit me hard this week how big and grown-up she's becoming. She's getting further from the infant days every moment.

Big happenings the past couple weeks. Eliza's been teething and now officially has her two top teeth through the gums and showing white. She has a big gap in between, just like her mama did before braces.

We've also been working on sleep training--meaning we are working on getting her to fall asleep on her own. Eliza is generally a good sleeper, but we would need (plus we liked to) to rock her completely to sleep. But as she gets older, we know it's not for the best--especially considering she'd sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and we had really hard time getting her back to sleep. So, we decided three nights ago to use the Ferber method of sleep training. That essentially means we would put Eliza down after her bedtime bottle, even if she was still awake (usually she falls nearly asleep while eating and then is pretty drowsy). Then, we say our good nights and leave her. We leave her for a set period of time--we started with 5 minutes--even if she cries. Luckily for us, Eliza didn't cry, but played in her crib and babbled the whole 5 minutes. Then, we would go back in and lay her back down since she was usually sitting or standing, say good night again, and leave. This second time we stayed out for 8-10 minutes. The first night it took about 45min to an hour for Eliza to fall asleep on her own; we went back in about 4 times. She only cried for about 3 minutes total the whole time, but was really have a good time chatting to herself in her crib! The second night, it took about 20 minutes before she fell asleep. I went in to check on her, and she had fallen asleep while sitting up and just bent over to lay her head down! It was pretty sad, though funny! So I laid her down, of course. Tonight, she fussed for maybe a minute and fell asleep basically right away. Success! (we hope). If she starts waking at night again we'll do the same technique, but hopefully we'll never have to worry about that.

We've also been focusing on food this week. We're introducing lots of table foods for our little girl--bread, potatoes, mango, and a little cheese. She is taking to it very well. We also tried shredded chicken and green beans, but she did not like it--she'd put each in her mouth and try to chew it then scrape it off her tongue. She loves pureed green beans, so it must have been a textural thing.

If you read this far, good job! Here's a reward of some pictures. :)