Time Flies

So today Ella is 7 weeks old. Hard to believe!

Here's a picture Grant took while we were on a recent walk.

She is starting to sleep longer at night now and with that we are trying to establish night and morning routines in hope that she will get used to them at a young age. The problem is they are lots of work for mommy and I feel in some sense like we are taking a step back.

At night we have been keeping her up and in the living room with us until her late night feeding and putting her down afterwards when we go to bed. This means we are crawling into bed between 11 and 12 and for us that's fairly normal. We may fall asleep on the couch earlier in the night, I feed her and then we go to bed, also kind of our normal routine. Well I'm trying to put her down now earlier and doing a bath and reading time beforehand. So around 7 or 8 I feed her, bath her, and we sooth and read to her since she doesn't like baths yet and is screaming. Then we put her down to sleep. The first night we did this I woke her up for her late night feeding and then put her back down and she slept until 5 am. Sounds great right - except I hated doing that late night feeding in bed plus the middle of the night feeding in bed, when I was used to just doing 1 feeding in bed lately. I do not like feeding in bed. My episiotomy is still not completely healed and it's hard to get in and out of bed while holding her, plus I can never get her high enough with my pillow and it hurts to adjust how I'm sitting. But for some reason if I feed her in the living room in our recliner she wakes up more and I have a hard time getting her back to sleep. It may be worth another try though....

Anyway, last night I was too tired to wake her up to feed her for her late night feeding and decided to let her wake me up when she was hungry. (At this point it's totally okay for us to let her do this at night) She woke me up at 12 which was exactly 5 hours from her last feeding and then again at 5 am. So she's on a 5 hour routine at night which is actually pretty good I think. I put her back down after 5 and it's like she knows when it's 8 am because she's up and ready for her normal 3 hour feeding routine.

Today, I'm super tired. I'm not sure which way was better, to wake her up or let her wake me up for that late night feeding. Plus as she starts pushing 5 hours to 6 and 7 hours I'm not going to want to get up at 1 and 2 am to feed her so I'll need to get her up at say 11 and then let her sleep to 6 or 7.

I have no idea. I'm just thinking out loud here. Feel free to leave suggestions if you have any.

Here's a recent picture of her on her play mat that she loves. She starting to coo and smile and we found that she really loves this thing now that she can focus.

So cute!