Noelle is probably about 80% better today, which is great except it means she's well enough to be running around the house (well, crawling) but not quite well enough to take out of the house. So we're both stir crazy from being stuck inside since Saturday, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Her sleep has been royally messed up by this illness, which I expected, but she had continued to do well with naps. In fact, she was doing better. The last few days, she would act tired, I'd put her in the crib, and she'd roll over and go to sleep. It was heaven, and I hoped it would last.

Then last night I put her in bed and she just started screaming. Not sure why, wouldn't take anything from us, and finally we picked her up to calm her down and she was fine. This went on through the night. This morning, she did the same thing for her nap. I told her no, your daddy and I went through too much work for you to pull this kind of stuff at naps again. I'll wait you out! And wait I did, through 40 minutes of screaming, at which point she finally gave in and sat down, and promptly saw a book in her crib and started reading it like nothing was wrong. Then she fell asleep.

This afternoon, I thought she was back to "normal" and after 20 minutes of rolling around in the crib I thought she was asleep. So I moved to get up off the bed and make my exit from the room. At that point, Noelle pushed up from the crib and turned toward me, and started shaking her head No. As in, "No, no, silly mama. Did you really think you were going somewhere?" So I settled back in for another 30 minutes of fussy baby before she gave in to sleep again. What a monkey.

6 nights in a row my baby girl slept all the way through the night. We were so proud of her! She was doing so great, but then she got sick yesterday and that abruptly ended her good sleeping streak. She has a stomach bug, seems to be the same one she had back in November. She threw up more times than we care to count yesterday and last night, and her fever got up to 102.9. So, we were up on and off all night giving her more tylenol, cleaning her up, and making her drink Pedialyte.

She seems to be a little better today, but she's still a little puny as you can tell from this picture of her laying on daddy this morning. As much as I hate to have her sick, I love love love how cuddly she is. Usually it takes everything in me to get her to sit on my lap for 5 seconds to put her socks on, she just wants to be on the move. But when she's sick, she's happy to sit in my lap for as long as I'll take her.

Hopefully she gets over this quickly and jumps right back into her new sleep schedule. But if not right away, at least we know it's possible, and we'll get it back again!

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We're at 4 nights in a row so far, and hopefully still going strong! I think it will probably take me a month to really believe it. When Noelle was about 2 1/2 months old, she slept through the night 4 nights in a row, and then never again until this month, so let's see if she makes it to 5. Then I'll know we're getting somewhere!

She has also started really picking up some of the sign language we've been working on for months. Mostly we do the signs for "more" and "all done" so she can communicate with us while we're eating. This morning Andy was feeding her cream of wheat, and she started turning away from it so Andy put down the spoon and read his magazine for a while. Then he noticed that Noelle was making the "more" sign, so he gave her another spoonful and she happily ate it. We are also working on the signs for drink and eat. Once she gets the hang of those we'll work on please and thank you, maybe diaper for when she needs to be changed, etc. But, she is also really good with saying actual words, so she may not need the sign language for long.

It is a happy week for us, and even though Noelle has always been a happy kid, she's got to be feeling better after getting good sleep.

...if I put it in writing that Noelle has slept through the night, ELEVEN HOURS in a row, for the last two nights? Honestly, I am still counting it as a fluke, and probably will until it becomes second nature to us (will that really happen??), but I am grateful for what it is. Two nights where we put her to bed and didn't hear from her again until morning. I was seriously doubting that it would ever happen, so even if these two nights are all we get, I have renewed hope!

I, of course, didn't sleep through the night and probably won't until I can take myself off high alert. But, I did sleep until about 5:30 both nights and fell back asleep proud of my baby girl. She turns 13 months old today, so maybe she just knew it was time. We'll never really know what did it, since we've been throwing so many variables into the mix lately hoping something might stick. Keep her warmer, give her better naps, give her gas drops, give her a bath in chamomile and lavender, feed her more protein for dinner, and the list goes on. Maybe it was none of that and she was just ready. I won't say we've turned a corner just yet, but we can at least see the corner coming over the horizon. And it's about dang time.

About a year or two ago, I was watching Food TV and one of the shows was about breakfast food. They featured a little bistro-style restaurant called Toast, located in downtown Chicago. They raved about the french toast (freedom toast?) and showed how they made it. Since Jaime's family only lives an hour from Chicago, I knew that I HAD to check this place out.

A few weeks before our next Chicago trip I told Jaime that I wanted to go this place. Admittedly it IS pretty far out of the way, but still...French toast the size of your HEAD (check the picture if you don't believe me)!!! She told me "not this time, maybe the next time." And she KEPT saying this through the next 4 trips to Chicago. Finally ovet this last Christmas break, since we were going to be in Illinois for nearly a week, I put my foot down and said "I'm going".

Luckily, my parents came up to Chicago to celebrate Christmas (and Noelle's birthday) and they were arriving via Midway which is just a hop away from downtown. Jaime wasn't feeling well so she stayed home and my parents and I made the trip to Toast.

Anyway, so we journeyed into downtown Chicago which was awesome in and of itself. But the pinnacle of the trip was of course Toast. We had hardly any wait at all (which was uncommon from what the wait staff said). We looked at what was on the plates of our fellow diners and decided that instead of each of us ordering something, we'd order 4 or 5 things and share them all.

And let me tell you that it's a good thing we did. The French Toast alone was a meal for two. We decided on an order of French Toast stuffed with marscapone cheese, an order of Applewood smoked, Gouda stuffed sausages, some scrambled eggs and a nice big bowl of fruit. We all ate until we were full and it was the perfect amount. The french toast was absolutely amazing and the sausage was the best I've ever had. I'm no food critic, but I know what I like and this was by FAR worth the trip. Click the link below to see some more pictures from Toast. Check the link

So...

Our child doesn't sleep. I know that sounds strange coming from the parents of an almost 13 month old but it's true. She exhibits all of the signs of BEING sleepy, but she just refuses to surrender to the soft embrace of her pillow and blankets. She must get her stubbornness from Jaime.

I would say that it's affecting our relationship with her, and that it's also affecting the relaionship between Jaime and I but that would be an understatement. I'll give her the first 6 months as being a "normal baby" but anything after that is just sheer spite on her part.

We need to do something but we both feel so beat down that it's difficult to bring ourselves to try something new when everything else has failed...and all the while Noelle keeps waking up crying/screaming/sobbing. Did I mention that she woke up 6 times last night from around 8pm to this morning at 6:30am (not counting her morning wakey-wakey)?

To top it all off, we've decided that we're going to have to get a new pediatrician. We've been trying to explain the severity of her sleeplessness to our guy, Doctor Haraf, for the past 5 or 6 months. Each time we do, he basically tells us to give her a pacifier of some sort (bottle, binky or lovey) but she doesn't take any of those. He then offers up a charming story of how his best friend's child was having trouble sleeping.

He explains that his friend's child was not sleeping and how the friend and the friend's wife tried everything. So finally Frank (our doc) and his friend decided to let the child "cry it out". Basically they kicked out the wife and ate pizza, played playstation and let the baby girl cry; several times so long and hard that she vomited. They would then clean her off and start their day. But hey...after only nine days she was "cured". I won't comment on the cry it out method, but I think that if you're letting your child cry so hard that they vomit, MULTIPLE TIMES, then there's a larger issue.

Anyway...that's quite a rant. We don't want to let Noelle cry it out. Partly because we don't agree with that method, partly because we think that she's too stubborn and that it wouldn't work. Hopefully we can find a method that works for us before you see one (or both) of us on the front page of the local paper.

Yesterday was a bad day to be a dog in this house.

In the morning, I let Duncan outside and when he came back in, took him straight to the bathtub because he was so muddy. It looked like he had been in a fight, and he probably had been with the dogs behind the fence in our backyard. I grabbed his front foot to wash it, and he squealed in pain. I looked down and realized he was bleeding, and upon closer inspection, it looked like he was missing an entire nail. I was heading out, so I wrapped it in paper towel and tape and left. When I got back, he had soaked through all of that and left little blood marks all over the house. It was still bleeding, so I decided a vet visit was in order. They confirmed that the whole nail was missing, and basically just bandaged him up and gave us some antibiotics. He cracked us up yesterday with his limping and general patheticness.

Then last night, we were watching the last disk of 24: Season 5 and heard something going on in the bathroom. Nacho was in there laying on the bathroom mat having a seizure. He has them every so often and they aren't a huge deal, but they are scary. With a little loving from daddy he was as good as new.

It was a crazy dog day, and I was thankful for Noelle's 3 hour nap in the afternoon!