My sister left Friday morning, with her car all packed up, and headed to Vancouver, to live this time. I'll miss her a lot, but I'm so happy for her. I think it's been a long time coming and that she'll be very happy. She was living in our basement in the two months leading up to the move and it really gave me an opportunity to spend a bit of time with her and get to know my little sister a lot better. We were never close growing up, didn't get along well and had nearly nothing in common. After I moved out of the house, though, I gained a great deal of respect for her, and three years ago I met up with her in Thailand for a three-week vacation that created a bond between us that never existed before. I am so proud of my sister and I know she'll be successful at anything she attempts.

It's Monday morning and I've been up since six, but my daughter slept ten hours in a row so I shouldn't complain. At the age of ten months she slept straight through the night for a solid week, but then stopped as suddenly as she'd begun. In the first six months or so of her life, I was obsessed with getting her to sleep through and tried everything anyone recommended to me, with absolutely no success. The books I read had great ideas on how to get a baby to go to sleep, all of which were useless to me since getting her to fall to sleep has never been much harder than putting her in a crib, reading her a book or two and turning off the light (she's had an 8pm bed time since she was 4 weeks old and she can't keep her eyes open much longer than that) but none of their theories ever kept the baby asleep. She wakes up at totally random times, and sometimes wants a bottle and sometimes doesn't. After six months, I gave up. I figured she will sleep through the night when she is ready, and I was wasting more energy trying to remedy the problem than I could ever recover with a full night's sleep.

So, it's strange to me now that her father has suddenly become so obsessed with having her sleep through. It's like watching myself seven months ago, trying everything, theorizing, panicking. I think he's beginning to worry that he will soon have to get up with her. I go back to work in a month and then it's open season for dad getting up with baby. He's an amazing father who dotes on his daughter and feeds her meals, changes diapers, gives baths and puts her to bed three nights a week, but he's useless at getting up with her in the night. Either he doesn't hear her until I've been up for more than five minutes (most times, she's up for less than five minutes, and he doesn't realize she's been up at all) or he gets up with her and has no success getting her back to sleep, and then falls back to sleep before I inevitably have to get up with her. He knows this won't fly when I go back, so he's really trying now. One great advantage of it to me is that now he's all over doing the things I ask him to around the house, especially when it comes to the baby. He didn't miss a beat with putting her air conditioner in her room, and then he was on a roll so he put ours in as well, and started our mini bathroom reno and mowed the front AND back lawn, and washed the truck and assembled the new stroller. I'm not convinced any of this will help the baby to sleep through, but it's great to have things done without asking.

I almost went back to work early. Well, there was this job that I nearly applied for, and would probably have gotten, and would have had to start in only two weeks. I wasn't ever excited about the prospect of going back early, but the job was everything I've been looking for and more so I thought I was willing to give up those last three weeks of mat leave for it. It meant I'd have my weekends free, and that I'd get to see my daughter every night before she goes to bed, two things that my current job do not allow, so it was worth it. Then I got up yesterday morning and realized I wouldn't be with my baby on her first birthday, and that quashed it for me. How could I ever give that up?

It's a beautiful day, and I will probably take the kiddo on a walk to get myself a Slurpee, and stick her in her deluxe kiddy pool in our back yard, and maybe pull up some more dandelions and perhaps even visit with the neighbors and invite my (future) SIL and niece over and just have one more beautiful day with my daughter, because these lovely, free summer days of mine are certainly numbered and I intend to cherish every one of them.