It always seems that problems come in threes. The last few weeks, poor Lena has been struggling with a cold, teething AND an ear infection. Needless to say, none of us are getting very much sleep! She’s been a trooper and for the most part has been incredibly good-humored despite how she must be feeling. She was on antibiotics briefly but the side-effects seemed to be worse than the ear infection. After a second trip to the doctor I was very relieved to take her off the meds and she’s been a different baby ever since. While still sick, she’s much happier and definitely seems to be on the road to recovery!

On a more positive note, she’s started babbling all sorts of new sounds, desperately trying to move AND has become incredibly opinionated about her likes and dislikes. It’s amazing the progress she’s made in such a short time and she continues to surprise us every day. She’s even started blowing kisses which is just about the cutest thing you’ve ever seen! The key seems to be unending repetitive play. She has so much fun watching faces or our actions and slowly attempting them for herself. We’ve even seen her use a few baby signs though it’s not clear she knows their meaning yet. The sign for “milk” for example, might mean either “mom”, “up” or “milk”. Only time will tell!

That said, she’s no longer sleeping through the night, can be incredibly difficult to put back to sleep AND likes to wake the household up incredibly early with no thought of going back to bed. We’ve been extremely diligent about discouraging any “patterns” involving her sleep habits and continue to rely on some of our old staple tricks but to no avail. She has gone through cycles like this before (though none for such a long period of time) and if we kept to our routines, we found she’d get herself back on track eventually. We’re hoping this method will still work for us and are trying desperately not to encourage any habits to form!