Week 16

We've been talking about the sleep training for a couple of weeks now. This week we really started implementing it. Emily has set up kind of her schedule: gets up at 7:00am; naps at 9:00am, 1:00pm, and 4pm; sleeps at 8:00pm. Since we moved her to her crib this week, she slept a lot better. Her naps were at least 1 hour long and she sleeps better at night too. But we are still practicing to let her fall asleep on her own. She would wail most of the time when we put her down awake. We can tell that she is learning to pacify herself. Her eyes were half open; her mouth made the "Yi-Ah" sound; a couple of her right-hand fingers were in her mouth; and her left hand fingers were swirling her hair or left ear. This definitely is a sign that she was trying to sooth herself to sleep. It was so hard to see her struggling to sleep and not to pick her up every time. But we've got to give her chance to practice that skill until she gets it. Of course, we picked her up several times before she got too stressed. Falling asleep is the hardest part for Emily so far. We'll have to celebrate it when she can fall asleep on her own 100%!


We are so grateful that at least her schedule is predictable now. David can have Friendspeak readers in our house when she is sleeping. (By the way, David got a year of Leave of Absence from his company to take care of Emily. We are so thankful that God blessed us with this opportunity for both Emily and David to stay at home this year.) Joey (from Taiwan) has come to our house for Friendspeak every morning this week. He seems to enjoy the study very much.


Emily uses her hands more and more. She attempted to flip the pages of her book when we were reading. She is also more aware of the people and objects around her. When she was sitting in the swing by our table when we were having dinners, she would stop playing with the doggie to watch us eating. She began to notice the cows and birds on her lamp shade. When she detected with the corner of her eye that I was taking a picture of her, she immediately stopped what she was doing and stared at the camera. David joked that "she is the typical girl! I bet her first word would be 'delete' instead of mama or dada ..."



Here is a picture of Emily when she was sleepy: