Difference

I expected Arabella and Sabine would be different. Before Sabine was born I wondered how Sabine would look different from her sister. The pregnancies were differnt, the deliveries were different, but then I looked at Sabine and thought, "she looks exaclty the same". It was deja vu. Sabine even weighed the same as Arabella had -- 7 pounds exactly. They had the same mop of dark hair, round cheeks, delicate hands, dark bronze-gray eyes. But there were differences right away. Within a few weeks Sabine had happily settled into a pattern, and slept well for a new born, where Arabella had never taken to a pattern and rarely slept more than an hour at a time until she was 3 months old.

As Sabine gets older I see more differences. Physically, she is not as long and lanky as Arabella was at the same age, though she is not far behind. She has lighter hair and skin, though only barely. Her teeth have been much slower in breaking out, she only cut her 3rd tooth this week, at nearly 14 months. But most striking are the behavioral diffences.

Sabine throws her food when she isn't interested any more, which Arabella never did. When Sabine notices the gate on the stairs in open, she stands at the foot of the stairs and yells MAMA! MAMA! until someone comes over to either gate the stairs or help her up them. If Arabella ever found a gate open she shot through it like a greased pig, and would be up the stairs before you even realized she wasn't still in the kitchen. Sabine claps these days, she imitates sounds, and sometimes parrots my words. She ahs a decent vocabulary for a baby, about a dozen words or more. Arabella didn't talk until she was more than 15 months old. Sabine has much greater fine motor skills than Arabella did, she loves to sort, put things inside other things, and has already figured out zippers and zip-loc technology.


Between the two of them I think we're in alot of trouble.

But even more than just hte differences between them are the diffences in how I have raised them. With Arabella I was the Sleep Nazi. She had a strict bedtime, routine and I used sleep training from the time she was 6 months old. And naps, we didn't go anywhere if it interfered with her ap time. None of this really helped, she was still up every night, half the night, shreiking like a banshee, but I tried. Arabella fought sleep like Beowulf fought Grendel. Finally, at about 4 years old, she settled into sleeping without having to be guided back to bed a half-dozen times a night. My grandmother assures me that I was the same, and so was Sue, her neice. She thinks we were afraid we would miss something.

With Sabine I have thrown all the sleep training out. I nurse and rock her to sleep, wait until she is totally out and put her in the crib. With the result that she wakes 2 to 4 times a night, and some nights, like last night, she stays awake in the dark in my lap for over an hour. I have never let her cry it out, more to prevent her waking the rest of the household than anything. And since Arabella is such a loud kid, we can't put Sabine to sleep until after Arabella, so Arabella always wakes Sabine in the mornings, when Sabine is still needing at least another hour of sleep.

It has to stop. So sometime between now and Xmas there will be alot less sleep happening in this house, and alot more screaming.