Babies "Я" us

We are learning new tricks everyday to keep up with the changes our little daughter is going through in her life.

She is 2 months old now and has started paying attention to our activities around her. She wants us to be around while she's awake...and while she's sleeping too! The first part is not a problem, as that's something we love to do - playing with her, talking to her and taking pictures:


..but the second part is a little tricky, I mean leaving a few times when its absolutely neccessary you can't be awake around your baby the whole night....right?

Me and Poonam (my wife) tried a few things - a large part of which was of course staying awake! Besides that, holding her in our arms and singing also seemed to work.

Recently , we read somewhere that one should try not to hold the baby to her sleep, but rather let the baby go to sleep on her own. They say rocking and ciddling the baby helps her become drowsy, and the you can slip her into the crib. Yeah, sounds easy huh? The trouble is the last part - slipping the baby into the crib. Seems like they have sensors on their back that tell them when they're being put on the bed (yeah, I know we all do - they're called nerves, but I am just trying to make a point)

I even tried to fool that - by cuddling her in my arms and then bending slowly into the crib such that she still had her face on my shoulder and that she won't feel a difference when I left her in the crib. Than slowly lifting my body up - leaving the princess in her golden bed.

This worked for a while, but not too long. This way she was still in an early stage of her sleep when I left her, and as soon as she moved or woke up - voila! where's that shoulder?

Then we started to rock her for a while afer putting her to sleep, to make sure she still felt our touch for some more time. This seemed to work better than the others, in that she went to a little deeper sleep before we could snap ourself away. But apparently there was something wrong in the way we rocked.

Lately we (especially I) have tried to work on the rocking thing. I try to gently move her back and forth while she's in the crib. That seems to tell her that she is still in my arms and gradually she goes into her dreamland.

Babies (and probably all of us) breathe differently as they move forward into their sleep. They have a shallow and fast breathing when the sleep is shallow, and it grows quiter as they go into a deeper sleep. So, as soon as I realise her sleep is deep enough, I gradually pull back, kiss her good-night and (hoping to get some sleep myself , deep or shallow) slip into my bed...zzzzzzzz