Goals

I recently remarked to a friend that I had so much on my "to do list". As a fellow coffee drinker and park walker, she just looked at me blankly, the concept of having things that really needed to be done having faded as fast as the pain relief of the epidural.

"You know", I continued, "getting rid of the dummy, Alice sleeping unwrapped, not rocking the bassinette, moving her to the cot".

"Oh", she said, "you mean 'Goals!'"

And I must confess that I like her thinking. A goal is something that you strive to achieve. That you'll work hard at but it's a thing of the future, rather than a thing of the present that you need to feel bad about.

Be this as it may, I have tried to prioritise what needs to happen to get Alice to sleep in the manner in which I'd like her to become accustomed. Following last week's eulogy to her wonderful sleep habits, you may wonder (as I do, sometimes) why I'm trying to fix what may not seem to be broken, but in fact there are some needs that must. So my order of priority is:

1. Sleeping unwrapped - I have to start to do this for safety's sake. Although she seems to have forgotten how to roll, when she remembers, she needs to have her arms free so that she doesn't land on her face in her sleep and stay there. Neither Alice nor I have worked out what to do with her arms yet. This is her natural position and surely it can't be comfortable?

2. Stop rocking the bassinette - I need to keep doing this for now so that she will get through more than one 40 minute sleep cycle unwrapped. Otherwise, she wakes up, realises that her hands are quite interesting and that's it.

3. Move to her cot. Could be combined with 2 when 1 is all sorted. She still has room in the bassinette and besides, am using the cot for storage for Alice's menagerie of cuddly toys.

4. Dummy - am not so fussed with this one. Nowadays, we only use it when first settling her for day sleeps. It tells her it's time to stop the chatter which has become so prevalent over the last few weeks and days and I remove it as soon as she is calm. I might wait for this one until after all those plane journeys in the UK, as it might come in handy then. And it stops her sucking her thumb, which is a really good thing.

So these are my goals for the next couple of weeks. Agonised over as only a person not working and with only one child can.

In other news, we have her 4 month immunisation jabs later today and as alluded to earlier, she has started to jibber jabber in earnest. Before, we had coos and goos. Now we have constant noise - very cute. The fact that you can hear it from outside with our windows closed (we live on the second floor) might not be that great for the neighbours, but at least she's not crying. In fact, she really seemed to be trying to sing along with Baby Mozart this morning and cheering on the Gladiators on TV last night. We are also at the stage of everything going into her mouth, which is also - at least for now - very sweet. Does anyone know when the dribbling will stop?!