Left to their own devices

Although I am a control freak, I have been trying as a parent not to get too stressed about everything and adopt the principle that most things pass with time (the "she'll grow out of it" approach) and that babies are surprisingly well designed things and tend to figure things out in the end.

And so Eve has managed two key milestones in the last week, with very little prompting from me, both of which make life considerably easier. The first is that she seems to have slotted back into a nice 3-hourly routine without too much effort from me. It still goes a little to pot when her wind wakes her up during a nap, or she falls asleep as she is eating and our nanny is not quite as strict on it as I am. But, in general, our nice little pattern of eat, play, sleep in a 3 hourly cycle seems to be settling down.

The second is that she is taking after her Mum and turning into a little thumb sucker. In the great dummy debate (helpfully contributed to by my Mum who has some amusingly middle class ideas about dummies) the Boy and I spent so long wondering whether we would or not that Eve has simply decided not to bother to wait for a decision and adopt her thumb instead. This now means that she happily goes into her cot, awake but sleepy, and then if you gently guide her thumb to her mouth, pops herself to sleep on her own. It also means that, at night, no longer does she always need me to get back to sleep when her wind wakes her up. This morning, at 6am, I simply guided her thumb into her mouth and she slept for another hour.

So, with very little effort from her disorganised parents, Eve has sorted herself out quite nicely.

Children - probably more clever than their parents.