Standing Tall

As you can see from our pictures, Madelyn has found a use for her feet other than chew toys. She isn't quite able to stand on her own yet, but with just a little help balancing, she can support her weight. It is a lot of fun discovering new talents and mini-milestones.

Mady is definitely a belly-baby. If we leave her unattended on her back for a few seconds, she will roll onto her belly every time. She will even try to roll over when we put her down for naps. This complicates things a little because she likes to keep her head up when she is on her belly, and it is really difficult to sleep that way.

Naps have become our most recent challenge, but we are making good headway. Mady is a much more pleasant baby when she gets some quality naps during the day. Our goal is three 90 minute naps. Until recently, she was taking four, or even five, shorter naps. She often wakes right at 40 or 50 minutes. We've found that if we can soothe her back to sleep as soon as she wakes, we can usually at least double the length of the nap. According to the books, after a few days of this, babies adjust to it and learn to take longer naps on their own. So far it seems to be working. She has had a couple 90+ minute naps in the last few days.

We have a had a couple rough experiences with taking Mady out in social settings recently, where she has gotten cranky and has been very difficult to soothe. She is usually perfectly fine when we take her to church, or shopping, or to the cafeteria. She also is generally just fine with letting other people hold her. Hopefully she was just having a couple of off days. We'll be bringing her out to Cleveland for Steven and Krista's wedding in a few weeks and we are hoping that she will be good baby when she meets all of her relatives for the first time.

We finished adding pictures to the May album.