Dress (similar) | Annabelle’s Dress

Oh my goodness you guys!! Ever since I mentioned our current daily chaos in this vlog, luckily things have wound down a bit. Ever since Annabelle turned 17 months old, she’s thrown us through the ringer! At 17 months she went through a crazy regression (I think it was the dreaded “18 month regression” early) and our world was thrown upside down. We’ve been bed sharing almost her entire life (minus those early newborn days when she was in a bassinet/doc a tot) and I seriously thought there was no end in site. Not that I had given up trying to put her in her own room or felt defeated, but because we truly didn’t see a need. We love having her in our bed and as strange as that is for most people, she’s been a pretty fuss free baby for the most part of her life. She goes down easy at night and having a king size bed makes it that much easier to not feel confined. Then the regression hit…it would literally take 1-1.5 hours to put her down at night (for 6 days straight) and Doug had to go back to the newborn days of rocking her! It was crazy. I think it was the combination of teething and a sleep regression, but something had to give so I mentioned on Instagram we were looking into the Montessori floor beds as a transition. It’s not even that we wanted to transition, we just thought she would go down easier. It turns out she needed only 1 nap a day instead of 2 so once we switched her to 1 nap things went back to normal.

It’s so funny how babies/toddlers change month to month! I could be pulling my hair out about a certain issue one month and the next it’s no problem. Now that she’s getting a longer stretch of awake time during the day, it’s so much easier for her to go to sleep at night that we are leaving her in our bed for now. We still have about five-ish months until baby #2 makes their appearance (finding out the gender this week!) so we aren’t in a huge rush to transition her. A part of me knows that if she was accustom to her own room before the new baby is here that it would be a lot easier on us, but another huge part that we both feel is that the three of us aren’t ready and are in such a peaceful groove (for now ha). We also want to savor our last few months as the three of us and soak up every moment. I get a lot of comments suggesting we put her in daycare or transition her to her own bed so we get more time to ourselves and to work on our business, but from the moment Doug quit we’ve decided Annabelle is going to be put first. I know some people may think that it’s strange, but we know that even though this is a trying time for us because she’s been so fussy, we have to remind ourselves that she’s in teething pain and needs us more than ever for support. We want to be there through every milestone even if that defers our business for the time being. We say all the time that we only have a few years of her with us at home and then she’s in school for 10+ years. It’s so sad! So we are soaking up every moment because they fly by. Anyways, I thought I’d update you guys on all this since I talked about the struggle in the last vlog, but remember to take everything with a grain of salt because I really only tell probably 20% of the story in my short vlogs haha I definitely want to vlog more because you guys seem to miss it! Thank you all for your support! xx