I thought progress went FORWARD, not BACK.

Two weeks ago, it was beautiful. Lucy was sleeping through the night. I know, I couldn't believe it either. She'd cry for about ten minutes around 7:30 or 8:00 pm, then fall asleep. She'd sleep like a rock until 11pm or so, when I got ready for bed. I'd get her changed, get her in PJs if I hadn't before she fell asleep at 8, let her nurse herself to sleep -- and wake up at 7am, rested and ready to actually live. Both of the mornings B was visiting, I actually was able to leave her in bed for another half hour to 45 minutes, and she could sleep without me there. It was astonishing.

And then, about a week ago, she started waking up in the middle of the night to feed again. For a few days it was two night feedings, and I thought I would just die. Granted, the beauty of breastfeeding and cosleeping is that the whole night feeding thing is dead simple. Realize baby is hungry. Pop out boob. Go back to sleep. Wake up periodically because her head control still isn't perfect, help her find the nipple again, go back to sleep. It doesn't take much. But still, twice means rolling over so she can get the other boob, and waking up more...so yeah, two days of it, and I was as dead as I was when I had an utterly new newborn and was on percoset. She's stopped that nonsense, but she's still waking up at 2am to eat, and then sort-of-waking-up at 5am. It's more like asleep fussing; she's kicking and whining and moving herself all around in bed. If we stay in bed, there is no solution. I can hold her and cuddle her and pat her back and play Glowworm and she just gets more stressed out. The first morning she did this (it feels like several months ago, but was probably just six weeks, since she's only, ya know, 10 weeks old) she worked herself into a screaming fit before I got the hint -- she didn't want to be in bed anymore. She'll sleep anywhere else -- the couch, her swing -- but the bed is outs. If I even try to bring her back in there, she spazzes out.

So here I am, reading blogs and Ravelry at 6am. About to commense the heel on these:


and continue listening to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. (Why did I resist the audio book thing for so long? You all are geniuses. GENIUSES!)

The socks, because I haven't posted about them in months, are the Bartholomew's Tantilizing Socks from Cat Bordhi's New Pathways for Sock Knitters. I read a fair amount of criticism on this book in the out-there because you have to flip around a bit sometimes for the patterns. Example -- in this sock pattern, the pattern is on page 27 -- but when you get to the heel, the book refers you to the "Master Reinforced Heel" which is on page 138 or something, and then the heel directions remind you to reexamine the cw and ssk/cw technique from page 14 or so. You go back to the pattern on page 27 for the foot, and then are directed off to page 140 or whatever for the toe construction. I get why this annoys people; it makes the sock less of a travel project, unless you have handy access to a photocopier just to copy those pages (because you, of course, own your own copy of the book). To me, it's awesome, though. If the fates are good, I may soon be embarking on a design project for a friend, and it's cool to have these "master" patterns out there, so that when I want to figure out how to do something, I don't have to remember which pattern the heel or the toe I liked was in, and then extract the heel info from the pattern.

It works for me. :)