Kyra Knows How To Nap!! Who Knew?

I've got a long blog entry today!

Kyra had a big day today! She woke up as usual at around 7:30am, and soon decided that she was absolutely NOT in the mood to nurse with Mommy. Quite a while ago, she ruled out all other daytime nursings and had chosen instead to strictly bottle feed. But I enjoyed our sleepy morning nursings and she seemed to also. I knew they wouldn't last forever though and this day would come sooner or later...I'm officially done breastfeeding as of today. I also recently switched her bottle nipples to the medium/stage 2 faster flow, so she sucked down her bottle in almost no time at all this morning. She was completely done with her breakfast shortly before 8am, and I was left wondering what the heck to do with her since we're not usually done with her first meal until closer to 9am.

She played for a little while and, at 9:30am, I noticed her rubbing her eyes and looking a little tired. I promptly took her up to her room, swaddled her, put on her fan and her Coldplay lullaby album on her ipod, and began rocking her and shushing her. She got very sleepy, so I laid her down in her crib. Normally she would scream and cry if I tried to put her down for a nap in her crib. But today, I could tell she was definitely tired. I left the room, held her door open only a crack, and quietly shushed her...and she actually fell asleep! 40 minutes later, I heard a small peep from her on the baby monitor, so I went and quietly shushed her again from the door. And she amazingly kept sleeping! She just needed a little help getting through her first sleep cycle. Unbelievably, she napped for 2 hours and 45 minutes! She woke up so refreshed, happy, and smiling!

I gave her a bottle, which she took down quickly. And then we were off to Target. She was happy during our walk, looking around excitedly at everything! And she was still happy in Target. When the store didn't have what we had come in for, I thought to myself, "Great, we came all the way over here and they don't have what I need. Now Kyra's going to get fussy and I didn't even accomplish anything!" So I decided that, since she seemed to be in such good spirits, to turn around and head home to get the car and go to Babies R Us. We did just that, and Kyra amazingly continued her happy afternoon all the way through Babies R Us!

I was so proud of her! I've always looked around at other Mommies with their babies in strollers in stores, wondering how their babies were so well-behaved. Not that Kyra's not well-behaved, but she seems to have a small window of time where she'll actually be content in a store if you're not moving the stroller or keeping her entertained. Ah, she just needed some rest! I found myself thinking that if I'm this proud of her for napping, I might just explode when she graduates college! Pride in your baby feels pretty good, I must admit!

When we got home, I figured she might get tired soon and I wanted to put the same technique into effect for nap #2. She didn't go down quite so easily this time, but she did eventually fall asleep after some extra shushing. This time, she only napped 40 minutes, which was fine since it was already 3:30pm and I was worried that she wouldn't go to bed at her usual 7pm bedtime if she napped too long. She wasn't too happy when she woke up from her afternoon nap, but a bottle solved that. She still got a little fussy in the late afternoon hours (but maybe not as fussy as usual?), and went to bed as usual shortly after 7pm! Hopefully she still sleeps through the night until around 7-7:30am. I'll keep watching her and following her signals. Hopefully we can continue to develop a good daily nap routine.

And if all that wasn't enough...Kyra did something else amazing! She discovered how to tug on her car seat toy to make the music start playing! She thought that was pretty cool, so she proceeded to do it throughout the afternoon.

I was pretty impressed with my little girl today. Can you tell?