Patience...

This is a time for waiting. I'm waiting for Sam to come home (he's out of town... Again), and I'm waiting to move into our beautiful new house. It's killing me. Patience is apparently not my strong suit. We made an appointment and did a walk through of our house again yesterday... It was more beautiful than I remembered. Plus we were able to see that our backyard deck is shaded in the evening. Cha-Ching! It's seriously so perfect. I have been trying really hard to be grateful for the rental place that we're currently in... Telling myself that most people in the world would love to live in it... But seeing our soon-to-be-home yesterday made my attempts at liking this place seem futile. I am so ready to move! I also went to our new ward again today (I attended last week) and it just made me that much more anxious to live there. I drove around the neighborhood after church to get a feel for the area and it was hard to leave and come back to the rental. The new house feels like my home and the house we're currently in feels like a hotel... It's very temporary and I'm ready to move on.

Klair is asleep right now. We started sleep training her last week. She was always such a good sleeper (sleeping 10+ hours through the night from 2 months on), but lately she had fallen into some bad habits. In April she started to wake up during the night. Because Sam and I were trying to get him through finals I would just feed her back to sleep. Well, she caught on. She realized she could get me in there more and started taking advantage. Then she started teething and the only way to get her to sleep was to let her sleep with us... Something I didn't want to do; however, I realized it was the only way either of us would get any sleep so I caved. Then we started the moving process. This of course rocked her world. Not only was her schedule disrupted by the madness of it all, but that house essentially was her world... And now it was gone and replaced with something much, much different. Thus, the poor sleep habits continued. And then, just when I thought perhaps we could return to some semblance of normalcy, she and I both got sick. My case was pretty mild, but it really hit her hard. It was the sickest I have seen her. It was so sad, and I had no choice but to let her sleep with me. She was literally attached to me 24-7.

Finally, she got better and Sam came home from traveling. I was exhausted from all of it (when I did sleep her presence next to me kept me aware and didn't allow me to ever fall into a deep sleep--I have about ten random bruises to prove just how tired I've been). I took advantage of the fact that my husband was home and there was no illness and we started the sleep training. My doctor suggested letting her cry-it-out. I couldn't bring myself to be that harsh, so instead I settled on the method found in "Sleep-Easy Solution," a book a friend had given me. It is essentially the cry-it-out method with a little more structure and the idea that every five or ten minutes of crying can be interspersed with brief visits to the baby's room where (without touching them) you could vocally soothe and reassure them that you're there and everything is okay. The first night we took turns going in every five minutes and after about 25 minutes total she was out. She woke up once, and then slept through the night. Now she goes to sleep after about five minutes of crying or less, and she sleeps through the night. Sam and I were even able to go out the other night for the first time in weeks. It was so nice!

She also naps twice a day. I don't even know what to do with myself with all this free time. Maybe I'll blog more? That's what I'm doing tonight. It is 8:30 and she's been asleep for an hour already. Too bad I can't think of anything all that interesting to say. And, due to the temporary nature of our current abode, we have opted not to pay to hook up internet. So, no Hulu and our movies and books are boxed up and stashed somewhere in the abyss of stuff in the scary basement. Maybe I should go to the bookstore tomorrow and find something to pass the time. It is liberating to have a sleeping baby, if only I could figure out what to do with myself...

Here I go looking at pictures of our soon-to-be home that can't come soon enough (again)...