Five months

Lucy is 5 months!  I can't believe she has been here for almost half of a year.  She is SO much fun these days.  Seriously, there's lot's of smiles and giggles around here.  I am three days late on this post, but here's the latest and greatest of Lucy at 5 months:

•  Let's start with sleep.  She sleeps!!  Yes, she sleeps.  Thank you so so much to everyone for their tips, encouragement, etc.  On a typical night now, she will sleep from about 8pm until 7am, waking up once at about 4am to eat.  Although, she has always woken up crying one other time before her middle of the night feeding and I haven't quite figured that out yet, but she goes back to sleep quickly and hopefully she's done with that for a while.  Anyway, Ryan and I feel so much more rested already.  It's amazing the difference it makes in your day when you get a few more consecutive hours of sleep.
• She found her feet and is constantly grabbing them, playing with them, and trying to suck them. 
• She watches our every move at dinner.  She will follow our fork from the plate to our mouth while drooling and smacking her lips.  haha.  
• She struggled with eating and gaining weight yet again (can this cycle please stop?) and I had to take her to the doctor.  Turned out she was constipated, which apparently makes little babies feel full, thus making her not want to eat.  Some milk of magnesia has been helping remedy that situation.
• Lucy loves going on walks outside (as long as we are holding her.  She continues to dislike her car seat).
• Every evening when Ryan gets home he says how much bigger she looks. 
• She always crosses her ankles.  Every time I put her on the floor her little legs go straight out and she crosses her feet.
• Still refuses to take a bottle.
• Does a really good job at paying attention while we read her books.
• She sucks on her fingers like crazy and has been pulling her fingers against her bottom gums until they snap away from her face.  She likes doing that for some reason.

Happy Birthday!

We miss our little Aaron buddy!  Today would be his first birthday and I'm thinking about him like crazy. We miss him a ton.  Happy Birthday, Aaron!

Just another Sunday evening

We have been trying for weeks to get Lucy to take a bottle and she refuses. At dinner the last week or two she's been watching our every move and trying so hard to grab our cups of water, so I finally just let her have a sip and she did great. So I put formula in a cup and she actually drank it! Baby steps. (And in case you were wondering, she IS wearing a diaper in this picture). (And please excuse the blurry cell phone pics).

She is not usually a cuddly girl because she likes to move around and see everything going on around her, but last night she just stayed like this laying on my shoulder for a while and I loved it.

Ryan was sitting on our couch and declared out of nowhere that homemade bread sounded good, so he got up and made some! It was so yummy with butter and honey.

That's all.

Easter 2012

This was Lucy's first Easter and it was fun getting her a little basket of goodies, even though she didn't really know what was going on. We went to church and had great talks and lessons and then came home, watched Music and the Spoken Word, and had a traditional Easter dinner of ham, cheesy potatoes, rolls, banana cherry jello, corn, and coconut cream cake for dessert. Last week for FHE we watched some of the videos about the Atonement and Resurrection and it was nice to be able to focus on the true meaning behind the Easter holiday. Happy Easter!!

Ryan says that Lucy inherited his sister, Rachael's, impressive stink eye as proven in this picture. :) haha. Those are some fierce eyebrows!

Duck eggs

Ryan was out doing yard work yesterday and he found a bunch of feathers right outside our front door, which he thought was a dead bird. Then he realized it was alive and that it was a duck! The duck got scared and flew away, revealing the next with twelve eggs in it! It's kind of amazing how all of those feathers make such a thick, perfect circle for the baby eggs. We found the mama duck later keeping a close eye on our house from a neighbor's rooftop, and we are happy to announce that she has returned to be with the eggs again. I'm excited to see all the babies!

If we had an Easter egg hunt in our yard, some little kid would have gotten real lucky. :)

Martin Family Reunion

We had so much fun in California for the family reunion. All of Ryan's siblings and their spouses and kids were all there, which was great since that may not happen for a while now because of everyone's school and work locations over the next few years.

This reunion was the perfect mix of relaxation and fun, and included: lot's of surfing (just Jonathan and Craig, and Marc joined in the last day, which was unfortunately the only day he could join us because of dental school boards), good discussions, searching in tide pools for shells, catching lobster to eat and crab as shark bait :), making matching kids t-shirts, playing bingo with awesome prizes, fishing, watching movies, drinking lot's of orange crush and eating treats like crazy, hot tubbing day and night, watching sea lions, dolphins, and sharks (yes, sharks... plural!), visiting with G&G Tibbitts one day, taking lot's of pictures, flying kites, playing with glowsticks, and building sandcastles. I'm sure there's more that I can't even think of right now.

Anyway, here's 5 million pictures because it's quicker to upload that many than to sit and choose which ones I like the most.

Desperate for help!!

Okay, so before I get too deep into this, I just want to start with a quick note that I realize there are people with much worse problems than this right now and I do realize that things could be way worse for us. That being said, I'm still getting a little desperate for help right now, so here it goes...

I've mentioned that Lucy is not a good night sleeper. I can count the number of good nights we've had on one hand since she's been born (two 7-hour stretches, two 8-hour stretches, and one 9 hour and 22 minute stretch.. yep, every minute counts... and also, this shows that she can do it!!). Other than that, here is a typical night: do our little bedtime routine, put Lucy to sleep, and, on average, get a 3 hour stretch and then she wakes up. Every stretch after that, on average, is only about 1.5-2.5 hours. This means that Ryan and I are up about 5-7 times every night and the ONLY way that Lucy will go back to sleep is if I nurse her. We've tried just soothing her by putting her pacifier back in and by rubbing her among many other things. We've tried not picking her up, we've tried picking her up... nothing works. Once in a blue moon she will take her pacifier and fall back to sleep but without fail, she is up 30 minutes later. Every time. Even when I do give in and just nurse her, she's awake again less than a couple hours later usually. There have been times where I have attempted letting her just cry when she wakes up like that, but the longest I have made it is an hour and a half and she was completely hysterical by the time I finally went in and it took another entire hour just to soothe her and get her breathing to calm down again too.

All of these signs make it seem like she might be hungry during the night, which I thought was maybe the case. Although, she is doing worse now than when she was a newborn! But I don't think she is hungry. I have been cluster feeding a lot in the evenings to make sure she's getting a lot of nursing in, and she has been eating rice cereal in the evenings for about a week now as well (which I thought would help, but not the case). When I do go to nurse her in the middle of the night to get her to calm down and go back to sleep, she sometimes will just latch on and not even really eat, but just relax and go back to sleep, so I know she's not hungry! Additionally, Lucy's pediatrician said she is healthy and since her tummy issues and reflux are now under control, he knows she is fine and said that at this point he would expect her to be able to do an 8-11 hour stretch at night without needing to wake up to eat.

I've given many sleep training efforts a chance for days/weeks at a time and nothing has stuck or worked. Ryan and I are so sleep deprived that it's becoming a very negative thing (not being able to function or do anything during the day, waking up late for work after being up all night, my emotions are a little unstable, etc.). We are to the point where we don't know what to do other than to let her cry it out all night long and not go in to soothe her for a few nights in a row in hopes that that will solve the problem. We've actually had many people, including Lucy's pediatrician, say that that would do the trick, but I just have a REALLY hard time going longer than I already have with crying-it-out since she gets so hysterical. But maybe that's just how hysterical all babies get when people let them cry it out and she will get over that...? I don't know.

Anyway, I am most certainly NOT asking for ANY sympathy because, as I already mentioned, there are so many people out there who have things way way worse than we do and when I think about those things, I am grateful that our only problem now is nighttime sleep. In fact, I actually feel a little silly posting all of this because of that. But, I've been praying like crazy for inspiration as to what to do about this situation and the last few days I have just felt like I should throw this situation out there on my blog to everyone reading this. So I am hoping someone out there who reads this might have some advice... anything.... that might help us figure out how to make things get better instead of worse in this department. Maybe someone else has had a similar problem, or knows someone who has had a similar problem, and can offer some suggestion that might be what works for Lucy/us. So if you do, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE either leave a comment, text me, call me, or email me at brittney84(at)gmail(dot)com. Thank you!!