100 posts!

Yes, this is my 100th post. Pretty exciting. Guess what, it is 8pm and Gwen is asleep in her crib, in her room! She only cried for about an 1.5 hour. So, I have decided that Gwen's lack of sleep is a problem for our entire family. I have finally gotten tired of having to lay down with Gwen to get her to nap, she doesn't really nap well anyways. Tonight we started sleep training Gwen. This is going to be tough, but fortunately we have 3 floors, if we go to the bottom floor, I can't actually here her crying (I send Eric up to check, I know she can sense/smell me). After reading my latest sleep book (I know, the scientist in me can not help reading feverishly about a subject) I think that it is possible our extremely fussy baby is this way from a lack of sleep, so we have started sleep training. Basically sleep training just means that we, I am going to try to get Gwen on a schedule. The schedule won't have to be incredibly rigid, we just have to keep sleep logs and watch her for periods of fussiness and put her down for naps after approximately 2 hours of being awake. I am still allowed to breastfeed her to sleep, but hopefully, when I put her down in the awake state she will EVENTUALLY learn how to sleep on her own/self-soothe. I know that she can sleep for long periods at night, she has done it previously, but lately I have gotten into some bad habits with Gwen, now I have to go through the hard process of getting her to sleep on her own. I hope that this will only take 4-5 days, but it could take more. So, keep us in your prayers. As I mention prayers, I would like to mention Gwen's godmother's niece & nephew were born this last week at 27 weeks, if you could keep them in your prayers, we would appreciate it.

As I mentioned previously, this is the 100th post, we should celebrate with many pictures, yes? This first series contains pictures from Halloween. It was pretty warm here, and Gwen was fussy, we didn't keep her in her costume long, we only have this one picture from the actual day, no action shots.

More exersaucer pictures, for your enjoyment. I don't know if I have mentioned that Gwen is starting to become more purposeful with her grabbing things. I was trying to get a picture of her picking up this little block. And just today, I noticed that she is starting to move around in the excersaucer! How exciting. It seems everyday we learn something new about the exersaucer. The little house actually makes noises when you press the button on the chimney, Eric has programmed one of the sequences with him saying "Hello Stinky". I feel the middle picture of this sequence is a look I am going to receive many times in my lifetime.

It has started to get cold here, the only hat that we have in the house that fits her, is this one that says 1yr. Eric thinks it makes her look like the Dough Boy.

This last picture is from today. We went to Brian & Reyna's baby shower today (their website is linked in my link section). Gwen was a very content baby, went to anyone that wanted to hold her and didn't make a sound. She was quite tired though, so she just looked kind of dazed, but at least she didn't cry!