Letter to Rosalind

Dear Rosalind,

You are a little over five months old and in the last couple of weeks you have absolutely exploded with new talents. Don't get me wrong, you have been growing and changing and learning at a pretty steady rate since you were born. Even with all of that growth, though, you still fit mostly into the category of immobile blob.

Not anymore.

You are a lean, mean (chubby, sweet?) baby food eating, rolling over, sleeping in your own bed all night, right on the verge of crawling machine. A lot of this new-found talent can be attributed to day care, and let me just say, you LOVE day care. And they love you. Which makes me happy. You have learned a sort of army crawl that gets you from place to place enough to almost follow the older kids. If you can get your hands, feet, and knees just slightly more coordinated you will be off to the races. In the meantime you do a magnificent push-up.

Since I mentioned the sleeping in your own bed thing I guess I will give the details. You have been a kind of not so great sleeper. You needed to be swaddled and using a pacifier to fall asleep, and then you wanted in our bed after the first wake-up. So I let you. But it was not ideal for either of us. Every time I moved you thought you needed to eat and then you would come unswaddled and get all kicky and punchy. I have been watching you for a couple of weeks now and noticed you don't puke in your sleep anymore and you don't really eat much at night despite the appearance that you do. So we checked out the Ferber book, took away your pacifier and swaddling blanket, and prepared for a crappy night by renting movies and making cocktails. And then you cried halfheartedly for less than fifteen minutes before passing out for five hours. You woke up and cried twice in the night and put yourself back to sleep in under ten minutes. You woke up another four or five times but simply played with your crib toy until you fell back asleep.

You continue to shock me nearly everyday. Last night was the first night I have slept alone in my bed all night since you were born. Joy!

You are great right now. Everyone you meet likes you. You even went to class with daddy one day and made friends with his classmates. I took you to work and you were taken away by some of the coworkers for hours at a time. When they brought you back you were taken over by sixth and seventh graders. The day care gets mad if we hold you out for a day because they miss you. Nobody believes that you were ever intense or unhappy in any way. I don't know how it happened but your father and I somehow produced a people person. Way to go, Rosalind.

Love,
Mama

(Please, please, please do not let me be jinxing the sleeping thing by writing about it!)