The Ashlan show: Crib progress

So Ashlan has been sleeping mostly in her crib for the past five nights. They have gone pretty well for the most part, absolutely no crying. This is good news and bad news. Good news: she doesn’t cry. Bad news: she wakes up a few times and our sleep is very broken and nothing like it was when she was in her car seat. She would be out the minute she went in the carrier and would stay asleep (not even moving) from like 10 or 11 until 5 or 6 usually. We would LOVE that again! It is definitely progress though. The fact that she doesn’t so much mind being on her back anymore and that she stopped flailing her arms and legs so much is a great sign! However, she did end up backwards the other day! Dan and I got a big kick out of that! She will usually be in her crib by 10pm and then will stay there until 2 or 3. Then she starts tossing and turning and will wake up, though she never cries, she just starts talking. So Dan or I will rock her just a little until she gets sleepy again and put her down. Then she usually stays down for another hour or two and then she’s up talking again. We try the rocking thing again and put her back in the crib and she may last another 40 min or so by this time. After she wakes up a third or fourth time, she’s either up for the day or we just put her in her carrier again because we want sleep! I just hope she gets used to the crib soon and is as good of a sleeper as she was in her carrier! And we’ll work on naps in the crib after she masters it for bedtime, I guess. She gets a few here or there in it but certainly not all. I do love to hold her but I want her to sleep in the crib for naps sometimes so I can do stuff. However, the Babyhawk Mei Tai has been working well for that. I can never count on her taking a nap on me though…sometimes she does, sometimes she doesn’t. I went grocery shopping today and she fell asleep in it for the last 20 min or so, so not bad but definitely not a good nap.

Yesterday and today I put a 9 month onesie on Ashlan! It is a little big on her but not much. Since she’s not even 4 months yet, this is really crazy to me! Apparently though, she must be big because people still comment to us how big she is for her age. I know the cloth diapers do add a little bulk but even the t-shirt part looks like it fits her. Her 4 month appointment is tomorrow so we’ll see how much she weighs then. My guess is 15-16 lbs. Not looking forward to her shots though! She also must be long because the 0-6 month sleeper blankets also don’t fit her anymore. She’d have to bend at the legs to get her to fit into them. So, she is now onto 6-12 months or 0-9 month ones. When they say they grow fast, they weren’t kidding!

Cloth diapering…ugh, where to begin. I really do love cloth diapering. Apparently, the detergent I was using (tide) was building up on the inserts and it created a major absorbency issue. Since I am new to this, I had no idea what to do to remedy it. I knew it could happen but I didn’t think it would be this fast. The diapers worked great for 3 weeks or so. Then all of a sudden I was getting peed on several times a day when I would hold her. I am part of an internet birthing board (it’s called BabyCenter) and they have a cloth diapering board within that website so I created a post and thankfully was able to get in touch with other cloth diapering mommas who helped me figure out what I was doing wrong. You can’t use regular diaper cream either, which I wasn’t, but I was using California baby diaper cream which is supposed to be cloth diaper friendly. However, the combo of tide, hard water, and apparently the diaper cream gave me such a bad build up that the diapers were leaking within 3 weeks of me using them! From what I’ve read this build up happened super fast since it usually takes 3 months or so before the repelling (lack of absorbency) starts. I thought I had wasted the diapers. However, I found I needed to strip the diapers, which consists of running them through a cold rinse, then a hot wash with borax, blue dawn, and regular detergent and then I needed to run 4-5 warm rinses after. Well, after all that, it didn’t work! And that took me all day! After a suggestion from another mom, I ended up scrubbing every diaper and insert by hand (that also took me forever- I had 32 inserts and 22 diapers of those kind) with blue dawn. I tested one first to make sure the absorbency was back and it was pretty good but not completely up to par. So now I’m going to try one more thing that was recommended for good measure. Although it’s taking forever to do, I am hopeful to save all those diapers. I’ve heard that sometimes build up can be so bad that the diapers are wasted. At the recommendation of another mom, I ended up going to Whole Foods to get the detergent that she uses. I’m not sure if it will work for me but I hope so! It seems to be holding up fine as of now on the new diapers but I guess we’ll see in a few weeks time. So far the new diapers are awesome and I haven’t had a problem with those.