Sleep

When we first brought Shay home from the hospital, we thought that she was a vastly different type of baby than Logan was. "Oh, she's a good sleeper," we'd say smugly to whomever happened to be listening—our friends, the mailman, the apartment manager, the lady in the check-out line at the grocery store. "Yes, yes," we'd repeat, in case they missed our smugness the first time, "She's a good sleeper. Yep, good. Not like her brother. Ha ha. He was a lousy sleeper. Still is, as a matter of fact. But not Shay. She's a good one. Ha ha."

Ha ha, indeed. Turns out she's not so different than her brother after all. Like him, she sleeps best when she is being held. Like him, it's been hard to actually put her down because she wakes up almost immediately. Like him, if we are able to put her in her crib without incident, she only sleeps for 30 minutes at a time before waking. Like him, she sleeps fitfully, flailing her arms around and waking up to nurse A LOT during the night. Like him, she's a light sleeper who wakes at the merest sudden noise – like a cough or the beep of the microwave.

Yeah. Not so different after all. We're handling it much better, though. We were mired in a quicksand puddle of exhaustion when Logan was born, which—combined with the fact that we had little clue what to do with a newborn—made everything more difficult. Now we think we know what we're doing, or at least we've added some steel to our armor. We're still tired, but we've been tired for so long that it's becoming second nature now.

Overall Shay is an easy baby—not much of a crier unless she's hungry or tired or in the car. At least Logan used to sleep in the car most of the time, but Shay just wails—although I have to say she's getting better about it now. Either it's age or because we bought one of those lights-and-noise mirrors to put in front of her seat as a distraction.

The funny thing about having two children (I mean, aside from the fact that we have two children) is how time becomes even more distorted. With Logan, we were so out of it that it seemed as if his first year went by verrrrry slowly. It took a long time for him to reach four months of age. But Shay's months are zipping by—she is already four months, twice her birth weight, and very close to turning over. She'll be a year old before we can blink. Let's hope she's sleeping through the night by then because chances are that Logan still won't be.