8 Months and Getting Better

I haven't updated much because it seems like things with baby are starting to find their flow. I'm not quite as exhausted and drained as I've been for months, I feel less resentment towards being a mother, and I feel like things are going to work out in general.

Charlotte is 8 months now and has reached tons of developmental milestones. She has 6 teeth, she's crawling rather quickly, and she's very talkative and responsive. She also likes to smile and wave to people. She claps and "sings". She's a little person with opinions and interests. It's starting to finally feel like all those months of exhaustion were worth getting to this much more fun point.

The only thing that she seems to have missed in the whole developing thing is sleeping. Supposedly, she should have been able to sleep through the night for around 2 months now. That has yet to happen. At the very least Paul has switched to swing shift and is able to help me with her through the night which allows me to sleep more than 3 hours at at time. I just wish neither of us had to wake up at all because even though he gets up to deal with her, I'm still waking up every couple minutes to listen for signs that I need to take over. I've been trying to feed her more solids during the day to help keep her from waking up hungry. I think at this point it's more of a waking up lonely issue and nursing is really the only way to get her to go right back to sleep. Otherwise she really wakes up and stays up and is rather grumpy about it. Naps have kind of taken a hit lately too. She just doesn't sleep much during the day lately.

Her babysitters tell me that she doesn't nap with them anymore either, but she doesn't fuss as much and is getting to be more fun to play with. One of my students qualified for the state vocal competition this weekend. With Charlotte's being more at ease without me there all the time and with this boost to my teaching track record, I'm hoping that I can work on expanding my voice studio a bit.

This next weekend we're going to start looking at houses again. It's been about a year since the last time we looked at something. I'm a bit apprehensive about getting my hopes up because we don't have our whole downpayment saved yet, but I also feel like I want to find a house to picture us living in so that saving is a more present priority in my head. You're less likely to have what you don't dream about right?

With that, I must head to bed. Paul's rocking Toot to sleep so maybe we'll get to sleep before midnight! Wish us luck!