Down for the Count

It's been a constant amazement to me just how quickly Gracie has learned new abilities.  New skills have debuted at a furious pace of late, all appearing out of the blue.  When I hold her, she can smoothly and rapidly turn her head all the way to the right, then to the left and back again.  At the doctor's last week, she was on the table and rolled over for the first time.  Just the other day, I was holding her binky until she pushed my hand away, grabbed it, spit it out and put it back in her mouth on her own.  And last night, she showed off her most impressive talent to date.

It all started out pretty typically.  After her afternoon nap, Grace was up, active and in a pretty good mood for most of the night.  Around 8:30 or so, she started getting cranky so we changed her diaper and started warming up her oatmeal, which had put her immediately to sleep almost every night since we started giving it to her.

By the time the oatmeal was warm, Grace had gone from grumpy to meltdown.  She was crying, kicking and found no solace in her dinner, shooing it away after just a few bites.  I put her in her swing, no luck.  I walked her around the house, totally ineffective.  I changed her diaper, strike three.

Out of ideas, I put her down in the pack and play in order to catch my breath and invent a new way to soothe her.  Then, out of nowhere, Grace calmed down.  I thought, "maybe it was just more comfortable, maybe she just had enough of her parents," but didn't stop to ponder it any further, choosing instead to slink back to the couch and see what happened.

Over the next 45 minutes, Gracie kicked and fidgeted, but never made a sound.  She just lied there happily, soothing herself by sucking on her fingers before drifting off to sleep.  It was absolutely amazing, watching my little girl learn how to get herself to bed on her own, for all intents and purposes crying for so long to tell us that she wanted to put herself to bed.

In the end, there was a lesson in it for me, something I hope to take with me for a very long time.  Before last night, it hadn't occurred to me that Grace was capable of something like that.  I figured that it would take weeks of work to get her used to the idea a little bit at a time.  It was an underestimation, a failure of my imagination, to assume that she wasn't able to put herself to sleep without my help.  It was the type of assumption I'm going to do my best to never make again.