On this, Phoebe's 3rd week of life, I had to go back to work. The team did a pretty good job of covering for me, so I didn't have too much to catch up on. The difficult part was leaving my girls all day long after getting to be with them for the 2 weeks, but sabbatical isn't much longer now. Plus it's great to walk in the door and have Ellen run to the door to greet me with a big smile on her face.
It was also hard staying awake all day. This time around has been a lot more difficult to find time to sleep. With Ellen, she was it, so when she napped, we could nap. Now, Ellen is up at 6am, and it is show-time until around noon when it is her nap time. Then Phoebe is not a heavy sleeper, so we can't get much of a nap then either. Phoebe tends to sleep best between 8 and 10pm. Then she's awake from roughly 10-11pm. I can usually get her to sleep after about 45 minutes of rocking at which time we put her in the bassinet to sleep. She's been waking up again around the 1 to 1.30am timeframe for a change and more food. Then back to sleep around 2am until around 3.30am. After that, she's very restless, so neither of us sleep much. I'm out of bed at 5.50am to take my shower before I let Ellen out of bed at 6am. I let Jada stay in bed until I have to get her up to shower before I leave for work. All told, we get around 3 hours of sleep a night...just not all in a row.
Phoebe seems to get stronger by the day. She can hold her head up for a few minutes at a time while she's looking around or at Jada or I. Her eyes are wide open more often, and she is starting to track objects now. Ellen is sharing her rattles with her, and we're using those to float above her to look at.
Ellen has been a great little helper at times, and queen of the tantrums at others. Such is her way these days. She likes to pat Phoebe's back to help with the burping. She also likes to "feed" her baby while Jada feeds Phoebe, except Ellen does it from her naval. It's still cute. She loves to help with laundry, and she can get up into her car seat in the van all by her self. From the back seat, she keeps us updated on Phoebe's current situation: hat over eyes, sun in eyes, crying, hands folded together. She's always looking out for her little sister. In my car, she realized the other day that she can't reach Phoebe. Yes, by design, I replied.
Ellen's vocabulary and comprehension skills continue to grow. Every so often she'll pull out a word that we didn't realize she knew or understood. Today, that word was separate. We were reading the paper, and she was separating out the coupon pages. We are constantly amazed. We check out 8 to 10 new books from the library every week. She can memorize her books in that amount of time and recite pages back to us.
We've given Ellen a deadline for getting into her "big girl" bed because she can almost climb out, and we need the crib for Phoebe soon. We went to Toys R Us and let her pick out a sheet for the bed, and we've told her that she has one week left. We keep presenting her with the option during naps to sleep in the bed but she usually decides to go back to the crib at the last second. Ellen is also working on using the big potty. She always asks to use it before getting into the bath tub, and she has pee'd in it 3 times now. We're just trying to get her to warn us before she needs to poop so we can try that too. She's doing a nice job so far.
This was Ellen's last swim class week of the winter session. We got to go down the water slide, and then we got to go to the other end of the kiddie pool where the water is shallow enough for Ellen to walk on her own. She wasn't so sure at first, but got to like it after a while. The next session starts up in 2 weeks for spring. This will probably be our last until the fall when we start bringing Phoebe as well. We'll leave our weekends open for other activities: zoo, hiking, bike rides, road trips, etc.
This week we also received another membership to a local Portland activity center - OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry). From what we've heard from friends of ours with children who go there, it has a great array of children's activities, and more importantly, it opens at 9.30am every day! Even Sunday. The hardest thing is to find places that open early. Another cool benefit of the membership is that it has reciprocal agreements with places back east such as Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry, and even the Lakeview Art and Science museum in Peoria of all places.
Pics will be posted soon from the first 2 weeks. Just need to find the time to scan. Hang in there.
Journal entry: March 23, 2003