sewing project: stocking

a few months ago i bought a sewing machine (barely used!) off a friend. i was super excited to teach myself to sew. then i started practicing sewing seams and corners and got scared. i had a big plan to make a quilt for jacob (this turned out to be majorly unrealistic for a first project). pinterest inspired me to start small and make jacob a stocking. i found a GREAT pattern and step-by-step instructions via this pin and decided to give it another try. the site has a pattern which you could print out, cut out and tape together, genius! yesterday i bought fabric, today i made a stocking (in 2 hours!!). it isn't perfect, but honestly i am quite proud of it anyways!!

sleep training works!

so about a month ago steve and i made a plan for better sleep. we needed to teach jacob a routine for bed time and nap time so that we would be able to put him down, walk out of his room and he would fall asleep. we had spent WAY too many hours rocking and walking and singing to him to get him to pass out. we also wanted him to sleep through the night.

our plan for the new routine was to put him in his sleepsac, feed him in his room with the lights low and then put him in his crib. if he cried we would wait 2 mins then go back in, give him his soother again, calm him down (without picking him up!) and leave the room again. if he cried we would wait 2 mins and then go back in again....etc etc. (the bedtime routine also includes a bath, pajamas and reading books.) this went REALLY well. he caught on fast. the first few days we had to go in 2 times to calm him and that was it. now we usually don't have to go in at all, he just falls asleep (even if the nap routine doesn't happen). it has been AWESOME!

cutting out the night time feeding took longer. we didn't want to cut the feedings cold turkey. we weren't prepared for the amount of crying that would take place. we decided to work on cutting out the dreamfeed (this is an extra feeding we give him before we go to bed so that he wouldn't wake at 1am for his bottle instead he would wake up around 3 and we would get a longer stretch of sleep. he sleeps through this feeding.). we started cutting that feed back but of course all this meant was that he would wake up earlier in the night to eat (ex: 12:30pm) and then started to wake for a second feed around 5am. this wasn't working for us. so we went back to giving him the full dream feed and decided to cut back on the middle of the night feed. he used to get 6 ozs around 3am and we started by cutting it back to 4ozs. we did that for about a week then went down to 3ozs, then 2ozs. we knew that jacob needed to learn to get his calories during the day and not at night. we noticed that he started eating more during the day. he wanted his bottle every 3 hours again, not every 4 and was eating solids a few times a day. instead of waking at 3am to eat he started waking at 4am, then 4:30, then 5am. 3 nights ago he woke up at 4:30, i stuck his soother in and walked out and he went back to sleep until 7:15! i didn't want to be too excited but i was pretty sure that this meant that he had figured out that he didn't need to eat at night. 2 more nights with only putting his soother in once....i think he's got it!!

steve and i had decided that we would try this method from nov. 1st-dec. 1st and if jacob wasn't sleeping through the night by then we would come up with a new plan of attack. here we are on nov. 28th and we have had 3 nights of wonderful sleep!!

moral of the story? your child CAN sleep through the night and you can help them along the way!! you do NOT have to accept sleepness as part of parenthood (ok, it's not like we sleep solidly for 8 hours or anything but this is SIGNIFICANTLY better) and we didn't have to go through days of intense crying it out at night (i am not saying that it's a bad method it just wasn't for us). i felt pretty bummed when i asked people for advice and ended up getting a lot of comments on how i wasn't going to be able to do it. i am happy that we persevered and now have a 6 month old who is sleeping well. :)

next up? getting him on a solid 2 nap schedule then cutting back on the dreamfeed. by 8 months this kid will hopefully be sleeping well day and night!

MRI news

so it has been 3 weeks since jacob had his neurology appointment. the doctor had told us that he was going to hand deliver the request for jake's MRI to radiology so that he could explain how urgent it is for jake to get in ASAP. we didn't know whether to expect a call soon with an appointment date that is 6 months down the road, or if we should just be waiting for a call that would come close to the appointment date. last week i decided that if we hadn't heard anything by today we would call and ask. this morning steve called the neurologist's office and they told us that the wait is 18-24 months and we should expect a call approximately 3 weeks prior to his appointment. thankfully i have a husband who wasn't ok with that answer and he decided to call radiology himself. they put him on hold and pulled up jacob's file and when they came back on the phone they asked steve if he wanted to book the appointment now! WHAT?!?!?!?! this makes NO sense! we were baffled! so the earliest appointment we could get was for jan 9th. honestly, we are so happy with that date! we had discussed going to the states, or going to edmonton, doing whatever we could to get answers sooner. but we had also agreed not to do anything outside of BC until january and now we don't have to. a daycare nurse will call me on the 6th of january with all of the info we need for the MRI. jacob will have to be sedated so i am sure there will be fasting involved so that he doesn't throw up when he is put under. thanks everyone for your thoughts and prayers! we are making progress.....it's slow but it's still progress!

can i get your opinion on labels?

a while back i posted about address labels and asked for your opinions. i am almost out of the labels i ended up purchasing so now i am hunting for new ones. i went through all 97 pages of return address labels on etsy and narrowed it down to 7. here they are, tell me what you think.

mellow yellow
i would change the top font

reimer
different colour scheme?

large chevron
i am fond of it just the way it is

dayton
i would probably do a dark gray font on top instead of brown

quatrefoil pattern

i would never, ever do these colours. i would do a light gray instead of pink and then probably a teal instead of the green

leonard

there are other colour options that are not as intense as this one....are these colours too much??

retro chevron

i like this colour scheme but i would also consider doing orange instead of gray and then instead of the green stripe i would do charcoal.....maybe....