An update.

After my brief post this morning, I thought I'd come back to write for a bit longer. As you probably gathered from my earlier post, Maia is becoming much more active and physically strong. She's able to roll over from her tummy to her back, and just today I saw her first roll from her back to her tummy (albeit with one arm pinned under her chest)! She's very deliberate in her movements now, and the feeling I get when watching her is that she's not too happy just resting on her tummy or her back. I wonder how long it's going to be before this kid starts to crawl?

Her sleep patterns are still pretty goofy from day-to-day; last night was better than our nights have been recently, in that she slept from 8:00 PM until about 2:15 AM, and then again until about 6:30. The group leader for my Mother's Group (who's also my Childbirth Ed. mentor) sent this article about the 4-month "sleep regression," and why it seems to be such a common thing. I know very well how fortunate we are that we had a great sleep pattern established from which we could regress--many, many parents do not have this at all! It's interesting to me that, technically, "sleeping through the night" for an infant means a stretch of five or six hours. From the way it's discussed--as somewhat of a monumental, wonderful milestone--you'd think people were talking about getting eight or nine hours. Nay. As new parents, you learn to be psyched about five hours of sleep in a row! :)

Maia is also in the midst of a very long nap right now, which is another thing I haven't seen in a couple of weeks. Maybe things are returning to "normal"? Or perhaps I'll write about new weirdness in just a couple of days! :)

In other news, during Maia's nap I've been able to take some time to schedule some things for my Lamaze training. I'm booked for two hospital tours in May: one at St. Joe's (again!), and the other at U of M. I'm also scheduled to begin teaching Lamaze's "Becoming Brothers and Sisters" class for older-siblings-to-be at the U of M hospital beginning on June 6th. I observed the class last week (after following around the current teacher and trying not to get lost on three different floors of the hospital complex), and I'm quite excited about the curriculum and the opportunity to teach little kids again. Very briefly, the class is comprised of a story, a bit of infant care (using dolls), a description of how babies are born (using an interesting "mommy" doll on which you can demo a natural birth and a c-section), and a brief tour of U of M's Birth Center. It's all intended to give kids more information about what to expect when the baby joins the family.

So that's what's up with us!