Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

I feel like the world revolves around sleep. I'm either trying to get Paela to sleep, or trying to sleep myself, or she's actually sleeping and I'm waking up trying to guess how much longer I'll get to sleep. And I used to be such a good sleeper, even sleeping through my alarm clock.... I just hope I haven't forgotten how to sleep through the night by the time Paela is able to!

What we've learned about her sleep schedule...she still loves to be asleep most of the time, but sleep time has become harder as she is becoming more alert the rest of the day. Keeping her awake to eat isn't such a struggle anymore (yay!!). But this means it is more challenging to get her to fall asleep. I feel lucky that she'll sleep a long time at night once we manage to get her to sleep (five or six hours in a row a lot, but not all, nights...and then going straight back to sleep after eating for another 3-4 hours), the trick is getting her to sleep. Naptimes are another story...we can tell she's tired but she won't stay asleep in her crib for more than 10-20 minutes, mostly because she can't put herself back to sleep. She'll take naps for a couple of hours if we hold her the whole time; those days feel like sick days with us camping out on the couch with pillows and blankets and books. I still have no idea how to do the "put them to bed sleepy but awake" thing since she will just scream if we try that. So in other words, we're learning, and she's growing, but we have miles to go before we sleep.

When we weren't getting Paela to sleep at home, we were out and about with the Moby. She does like to sleep in that thing. We went to campus late Friday so Wayne could get work done but not be apart from the rest of us. We almost did that Saturday night too, except that we got distracted by all the fun Christmas things at Target beforehand and decided it was too late to get much work done after all. We did come home with a star for the top of our tree (finally found one! after four years!) [I hope I like it... -wayne], and we look forward to pulling out Christmas decorations this week. As a side note: they make LED Christmas lights now: reduction on energy and longer life...cool. And they had a really fun advent calendar with 25 little wooden doors to hide the candy behind -- but we just came home with the star. And then we sang Christmas songs to Paela before she fell asleep [and the monkey Veggie Tales song]. It's a fun holiday season. As another side note, we got a mystery package from the San Francisco music box company, but no idea who it's from -- any one fessing up?

Paela also slept through my very first sushi experience. We asked Chris and Alyssa to introduce me to sushi last week, and had a lot of fun trying things that I didn't even want to know what they were. It was interesting, and I liked more of it than I expected to. Though I didn't like the octopus. Too rubbery.

Paela did not, however, sleep through me being visit taught, poor thing. Poor Wayne, too, since Paela was pretty inconsoluble and so worked up. Neither of us could calm her down; in the end she just crashed that night. She ate through visits from Angela and Kate other days, so she didn't get such a chance to get so worked up about not being able to sleep. Maybe she was just worked up that she didn't get to come say hi....

And she slept through all three hours of Church today, while I taught again for the first time since the day before her birth. Teaching went well, except who lets half my class come to Church with colds?? At least Paela was nice to Wayne and slept the whole time. Count our many blessings.