Four Months

Elsa turned four months old yesterday, and we celebrated by giving her her first solid food, rice cereal! I'm not sure how much of it she actually swallowed, as opposed to dribbling it down her chin and the front of her bib, but overall I think it was a good first adventure in the world of solids.

Other than that, we're still having major bedtime issues. She continues to be a wonderful, happy baby during the day, but at bedtime, the fussiness starts, and that can escalate to a full-on screaming rage, sometimes lasting an hour or even two, if we don't nip it in the bud quickly. I'm no longer convinced that teething is to blame—I think she just has a very difficult time calming herself down and going to sleep, so we're trying to help her learn this skill, just like any other. In order to keep her from getting overly tired, we moved her bedtime from 8:30 or 9 p.m. to 7, and that seems to have helped. Otherwise, when she does get really worked up, it can be extremely difficult to get her calmed down. There have been a few times where literally nothing has worked—we've tried the swing, white noise, loud white noise such as the vacuum, even putting her carseat on the washing machine. You name it, we've done it. The one thing that does seem to work is taking her for a ride in the car ... that is, until we get back home. As soon as we take her out of the car, she starts screaming again. Of course.

So, our calming efforts have mostly involved a lot of patting, shushing, and singing—sometimes upwards of two hours of patting, shushing, and singing. It's fun. : ) Another problem is that even when she does finally fall asleep, she tends to wake herself up frequently in the first hour or two, so we have to run back in there to do some more calming, or she eventually works herself into a frenzy again. Some nights are better than others, but I do think she's making progress. And once we make it through the first hour or two, she almost always sleeps through the night without incident, so we try to be thankful for that much. And at least her fussiness is predictable and well-contained to the late evening hours, allowing us to keep her far away from the rest of the world at those times!