not a sleeper but still a sweetie-pants

Bitty baby Isla wore her favorite 0-3 size onesie two days ago. She was pushing the limits of its length, but still fitting right into the middle part with a bit of room to spare. Her clothes have not changed much since birth, as she fits into all but three of her newborn dresses and a few onesies. Her jammies, though, are another story. Those legs of hers are long, long, long, and at night, she swims in the excess fabric of her size-six-to-nine sleepers.

Speaking of sleepers, we-the-very-tired-parents find it amazing that our Bun-baby is not one. She sleeps, true. Short, random bits of rest - in the car, mostly - and sometimes, on a great day, she'll take a nap in the afternoon for two hours. Last night, out of the clear blue, she slept an incredible - oh, so incredible - seven hours, from ten-thirty to five-oh-oh a.m. on the dot. But this is not the norm by a long shot.

A normal night with our sweet little fussy-pot is a resistance to bedtime that begins with horrific screaming. It is worth the repetition: horrific screaming. These are the kind of screams that we are familiar with hearing when she is hurt, like say getting stuck with a ton of needles at the doctor or struggling with some 'we-didn't-know-you-couldn't-take-dairy' newborn gas'. Or the kind of screams our four-year-old lets loose when she falls down on concrete and tears the skin off her leg. They go on for as long as she is lying (though these days she actually pulls herself up and either sits or stands up against the side of her bed) in her sleeping space.

Once we pick her up, she's fine. She takes about ten minutes to collect herself while we hold her shiny faced and shaky little body in our arms. Then she's back to Mama for comfort. If Dadoo tries to walk her back to sleep, (God bless him for those moments of respite), she arches her back against his hold and screams some more as he carries her into the playroom for soothing. Sometimes it works, and she calms down enough to fall back to sleep for two hours before waking up again. Sometimes, it doesn't, and she ends up back with Mama, cuddling her tiny body right up under the covers, as close as she can get to her milk-supply.

During the day, we've been using the controlled-crying method of learning to sleep. It is not always successful. It is getting better. She is sleeping more than she used to sleep. And in between the not-sleeping, she's still being her sweet little self, cuter and cuter and sweeter and sweeter each day. It's this part that makes up for the long, rest-less days and nights.

Take for example her new skills: "Yay!" and "Where's Isla?". These are two games she's been working on for a month or two and ones she's recently nearly perfected. "Yay!" involves big smiles and claps and a sort of yay-like sound,( truthfully it's more like 'aaaaaaayyyyzzzzhhhh', but we know what she's trying to say). She's begun to do this whenever she sees her Dadoo come home from work and when her Mama picks her up to change her diaper. She also does it with added bouncing when she sees Remy.

"Where's Isla?" could be one of those top-five-cutest-things. She balls her fingers up into near fists and puts them over eyes, leaving them there until someone notices and asks, 'Where's Isla?' after which she pulls them down quickly and smiles a teensy-bitty smile and jams them right back up over her eyes. She will play this game over and over and over and over without pause.

In addition to these super-cute-skills, she has moved beyond the army-crawl into a full on tummy up racing position. Except on non-carpeted surfaces. She does not like the feel of tile or wood on her knees, so when she encounters these types of flooring, she puts her flat feet down on the floor. It makes for a hilarious crab-walking kind of movement as she struggles to find her center of balance.

And ... drum roll ... she's cruising. Wow for us. Yay for her. She is doing this months earlier than our first born, and we are excited and slightly nervous. There is little in our home that is actually child-proofed to the extent needed for a new walker, thanks to the ease of life we've had since we got a four-year-old who knows not to put stuff in her mouth. Also, that four-year-old has so many tiny toys with tiny parts. And we, expecting the same sort of 14-month-old timeline for beginning steps have only recently realized that, um, our bitty-babypants is right there, right now.

Sweetie-pants is as sweetie-pants does, and our own blossoming pot of sweet is so, so very full of all that sugar. Here she is enjoying the art during her first trip to an art museum. This exhibit is called, 'Delicious: a portrait of the artist as a ten-month-old'.