12 Weeks Old

Wow.  I blinked and somehow 12 weeks of my life have gone by.  How can it be that 12 weeks  ago I was going through the longest labor ever (28 hours), spending the entire Thanksgiving Day in and out of pain, and still deciding on a boy name?

And now here we have this little baby.  She's still a little baby, but she's no longer a tiny newborn.  She now knows when we leave the room.  She now smiles when she sees us.  She now sleeps at night (not all night, and not every night, but many nights she does sleep)!  She reaches out to try to grab things.  She kicks her legs when she's excited or happy or mad.  She makes all kinds of noises all the time. 

 12 weeks ago I felt thrown into a world that no classes could have prepared me for.  This baby has been with me every step of the way as I figure out how to be a mother to her.

Lately, I've been reading a lot on "sleep training".  Most pediatricians say to wait until your baby is 3 months old to try any sleep training, so I've just been reading up before she turns 3 months (next week!!).

Most of what I've read includes: how to switch your baby to sleeping in the crib, how to get your baby to fall asleep on her own, how to get your baby to sleep for 12 hours straight at night.  Unfortunately, almost every technique out there includes leaving baby to cry at some point.  And however painful that may be, it's supposedly easier to do during the 3-6 month time span than any time after 9 months.

But maybe I'm not ready to sleep train.  Maybe I enjoy nursing her to sleep every night, it's such a special time for us.  Maybe I'm not ready for her to be in her crib yet. Right now, I don't want her to even be one room away from me.  I want to watch her chest as it rises and falls for each breath.  I want to be right next to her when she awakes (even if it's at 3 am).  Even if it means less sleep for me, it means being closer to her.  And that's a trade off I'll take any day.