Eat and sleep, eat and sleep

We bought Chloë a new booster seat for the dining table. Her previous one has been strapped to the same chair since she was about three months old and she's used it, first with and then without the tray, ever since. When we realized that Maia was in fact getting close to being able to sit in it (when does she grow? How does she do it?), we further realized that a new one must be purchased, and it would be nice if the new one didn't have the annoying bumps and straps that the current one does that get in Chloë's way.

So the new one is a little lower, a little flatter, with the straps and sides removed, and she can climb into it herself. This is a big improvement, and makes her feel very proud. She can remove her own bib, too, and is getting much better at using her fork so her hands aren't always the food-encrusted blobs they used to be. Mealtimes are much less messy than before. Of course, with Maia a little over a month away from potentially starting on solids (really? When did that happen?), it's a very temporary reprieve.

In the meantime, Maia continues to do well with her bottles and to nurse to sleep almost every night. I find it so annoying that I can't remember how we did bedtime in Chloë's early months; but I don't think it was quite like this. What particularly frustrates me is that if I nurse her to sleep in the glider, I can often pick her up and put her in the bassinet for the first part of the night, but only if I fall asleep with her. If I stay awake in the chair to read, even if I wait until she seems dead to the world to move her, she wakes up. You wouldn't think that being drowsy and grumpy would make me a better lay-the-baby-down-er, but apparently it does. Or else when I'm sleeping something gets in the milk that makes her sleep harder. I can't imagine what would happen if we were bottle-feeding only. Would we be insane with sleep deprivation? Buying D batteries weekly so she could sleep in the swing? Or would she have decided it wasn't worth taking advantage of us over and started to stay asleep when out of our arms?

At any rate, I can't wait until we can start getting her to sleep by herself a little more. We were doing great for a couple of weeks, but she seems to be regressing, which means I'm getting less time in the evenings to do things and she's getting less sleep. She does seem to be lengthening her time between feeds, going two and a half hours or so much of the time, and that's a good step. Someday I will sleep four hours in a row again.