Sleep...

It's 11:30pm. Sydney is awake. And I mean wide awake. As she is every night at this time. She always stays up an hour and 45 minutes after she wakes up. But no matter what time she falls asleep, 8pm, 9pm, even 9:45pm, she wakes up at 10pm almost on the dot.
Here's what we've tried: We give her formula at night to try to help her sleep longer. We've tried feeding her in her room with the lights off and still swaddled but she's just wide awake after she eats. About three nights ago I fed her and was able to get her to go right back to sleep. I tried again tonight and as she was drifting off to sleep, Max moaned in his room and it was enough to completely wake her up.
So here I am awake (Chris has early morning meetings) with Sydney who is as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as ever. The thing is, she's always been a night owl. When she was first born I had to wake her up all day long so she wouldn't be up all night. And a week later she would be back to sleeping all day if I let her. I've constantly had to keep her days and nights right. So now she goes to bed around midnight, eats around 4:30am and sleeps until 9am sometimes. Tomorrow I think I will wake her up at 7 or so and see if I can't change the circadian rhythm a little bit and get her to go to bed earlier. But I'm out of ideas if that doesn't work. Any suggestions??

Quiet Book

A newborn is not the only reason I have been away from the blog lately. Back in September my friend Rachel asked if anyone wanted to do a quiet book with her. We all chose a page and then made that same page enough times to give each person a copy. We ended up needing FIFTEEN copies of each page. (!)
A page was front and back and if we wanted two books, we could do a second page. I chose the abc's, getting dressed, and colors for my pages.
This is what my pages all looked like at the end:
Below is an up-close look. The page folds in half so that the abc's are one page, the "closet" with clothes is on the left side, the person to put the clothes on is on the right, and the balloons are on the back of the person page.
Max likes it already. THANK GOODNESS because it was A LOT OF WORK!!!Below are all the pages we got minus two that are still coming from Virginia. I am working on sewing them together now and putting in the eyelets. Max is still a little young for most of the pages but he has fun looking at them. It's going to be great for church, dr's offices, and airplanes!

This is the cover I made.

If anyone is interested in a closer look at some of the pages, I can post individual pages. We also used this blog a lot for ideas and suggestions. http://quietbook.blogspot.com/ We did our books on heavyweight pellon instead of muslin though. I've talked to a few people lately who have just started doing their own. All I say is - GOOD LUCK! It's worth it when it's done!

THANK YOU RACHEL!! I never would have finished this on my own!