Why I choose to own two "Dangerous Breeds"

When I was a kid we always had dogs. And cats. And usually fish. To say my household was a busy one was an understatement. Now as an adult that has still carried forward in my life. I have always had a dog so life without my dogs would be weird to say the least. Now my dogs combined are 170 lbs and eat approximately 40 kg of dog food a month. Gotta keep those motors running!  I have a American Staffordshire Pit Terrier. Or like some may know a Pitbull. My Thor is the gentle giant you wouldn't expect him to be. While he is lumbering around with 85lbs of not-as-lean-as-he-should-be weight, he does so pretty gently considering. He is a re-homed rescue. I got him from my sister who has had him since he was 9 months old. He was abused and weighted far too little when she got him and he was extremely timid, especially with men.

Thor is a completely renewed dog. He isn't timid. Most days hes our best dog by far, he listens outside, and 95% of the time he can go without a leash. When he is interested in something he just stands there and perks his ears with the cutest head caulk. He's quite intelligent in his own way. He is lazy by default (Wait till I explain onyx). His favorite time of the day is dinner time, he knows the minute your scooping food. But he also knows that rushing to the door where we are with the food wont get it any faster so he just lounges on the couch until you begin walking towards with his bowl. Then he'll get up and stretch a little and take a millennium to physically sit (probably makes it harder for himself to sit that slowly).  One of the cutest things he does is when he plays with you and nibbles you with his very front teeth just ever so gently.

Now his life is pretty fantastic. While he doesn't get as many walks as he probably should, he seems pretty content sleeping on our couches all day and snuggling in the evenings.

With our daughter, he will sit and watch her but keep his distance. When I move with her, he moves with me. He follows us everywhere. Now some may think this is a pretty long intro for just Thor, but I just wanted to let you know, he is a member of our family and while he doesn't know where his feet are in relation to his legs sometimes, I love him wholeheartedly.

Our other dog is Onyx. Now Onyx is 86 lbs and stands 31 inches to his front shoulder and about 36 inches if you measure to his head. In case some of you can't picture that, his shoulders are inline (conveniently in his mind) with my dinner table and he just lifts his head a slight bit to put his nose on the counter. He actually physically sets his head down on the table to beg for dinner. Hes bigger than breed standard not only in his stature but in his personality too. He is a Doberman Pinscher. He's almost three now and probably 10 times calmer then he ever was. Probably 100 times. His breed is often described as stubborn (check), high plus plus energy (check), intelligent (check, check). Glen got him right before we started dating (probably half the reason we started dating), to run with him. They are known for agility and stamina. His favorite toys are balls he could go for what feels like forever playing catch. He guards our house with his lumbering bark, but runs like a chicken from the vaccuum. He has, what seems like endless energy. He has come home from a 10km run he will sit for 15 minutes and be ready to play again. He burns tight tight donuts when he gets really jazzed in the house (it's way cuter then you would expect).

Onyx has the cutest understanding with our daughter. He knows he has to maintain distance. He understands (kinda), that she can't play ball with him yet (This is a big one as normally to get you to play he bumps you continuously with his ball till your annoyed and throws it for him). He watches her from a far and does a daily smell check where he smells her ears and her belly button and her diaper. He noses her gently and gives her the cutest air kisses.

While I make my dog sound like a terror at times, he is really well behaved based on normal peoples expectations. We just set high expectations for both of our meat wagons.

We've been discriminated against quite openly in fact. It's not uncommon for people to cross the street when they see us walking. Our dogs walk beautifully on there leashes right along side a person. Thor never ever barks and hardly pulls, he does love kids though. He just wants to get close and be petted and rub up against them, but I could see how he would look intimidating. Onyx whines and gets bouncy when he is excited. Again, this doesn't help how people perceive him.

They say that when you have your first child you really learn what love is, you realize that the things you loved before aren't as lovely anymore. For me I have really learned that instead of this cliche, having my first baby, has made me realize she is my third. We can almost see what they are thinking, were baffled often by how intelligent they are. I dare say their personalities shin brighter than my own. You go through the same things with them, you watch them learn and grow and figure things out. I'm just as amazed by my daughter learning to roll as I was when Onyx learned to open his toy box. These dogs are very much so a large part of our lives.

We did our research, we knew how to handle them, we knew onyx would come with a stubborn attitude that would need someone more stubborn to outwit him. We let them play hard in the yard and burn energy, we let them be dogs.

As annoying as he is.... I actually love how stubborn Onyx is sometimes.

We push our dogs limits with understanding of the potential consequences. We did it before too but now we do it for our daughter. We know what acceptable play with a dog is, but there are days she will forget. No matter what dog you own you have to treat them with respect. Our dogs put up with far more then you would think. In fact Onyx's favorite hand game is when you flick his ears and he chases your hand around. When he catches it he mouths it then licks it. He also does this cute  thing when you lay under the covers, he digs for you with his nose, digs and digs until he finds you then wants to lick your ears and face and rub his head on you.

Our dogs may be "dangerous breeds" but our dogs are not dangerous. Just ask my 85 lb pitbull who snuggles on the couch with a pillow and blankie.

Help! The 4th month sleep regression!

Well my sweet baby turned 4 months old a few days ago. And the dreaded R word pretty much rode in with her four month milestone to the T. For the passed week we've been struggling with naps not lasting more than 45 minutes. And nights.... we went from the beautiful dreamy and cushy 12 hours a night straight through.... to three to three and a half hours max over night. And sadly for my poor eye bags... usually only 1 1/2 hours to two hours.

It's amazing how fast you can become sleep deprived.... I feel like a zombie. The worst part is that I feel like it's even worst than when I was big and round and waiting for her to make her entry into this world. I was sleep deprived already then. As my belly grew so did the sleep deprivation and the amount I was uncomfortable. This time it's just hitting us all at once. Sadly I can't just sleep in bed till 10 am to make up for all the amount I am losing over night like I did before Avah was born. Now I have this tiny human being that isn't sleeping, and cranky yelling at me.

The sad part is we have probably been shooting ourselves in the foot a little. We have been letting her nap four or five times a day to make up for the amount she isn't napping.... We .... well I have let her sneak into our bed a few times too. Momma needed her shut eye.

The worst part of all of this is that a lot of the literature I read says our 12 hours a night is a thing of the past. That our baby will sleep well again but may never sleep quite like that ever again.

On the other hand.... our baby still isn't doing as bad as she could be. I'm sure every mom who is dealing with a little less sleep reads the story about the mom getting one hour of sleep. REJOICE that is not me and I can tell you a secret. Misery loves company and boy was it a full house after I read that.

Now I realize that some mom's could rolls their eyes at me.... 'pft please it's been a week wait till you've been doing it three months.... well I have three words for them... No thank you. Glen and I have discussed what we are going to begin doing to try to help our baby sleep well again. I've been doing a lot of extra curricular reading on the topic and there thankfully is a lot of resources for times like this. Here's a little compiling of the ones we are going to try!

1. Firm up our routine.

With Christmas having just passed.... we slacked off a little and let things get pretty lax around her. and GASP we even let avah go three days without a bath.. normally she gets a dunky doo as part of her bed time routine. Now I know what your thinking again.... babies don't need a bath everyday. But it's Avah's favorite thing of the day. So we have to get back to that

2. Get up at the same time everyday to facilitate napping during the day.

Again this is a little part of the routine we want to establish with Avah

3. Put her down full.

Loads of mommy blogs advise against feeding associated with sleeping but I really want to make sure Avah is full. I think she may be hungry. And, really who wants to sleep if their tummy is rumbly.

4. Ensure A Clean Diaper

For obvious reasons i'm sure.

5. Ensure we play during the day.

If her mind is stimulated while she is awake she may be tired enough to go down hard for a nap. We have had days were my dog barking wont even make her flinch (and he has a loud booming bark) Even when he barks inside of her room some days.... Other days, you drop a spoon in the kitchen and she's screaming awake. Lol. I prefere the baby who sleeps through the dog.

6. Establish a time for naps.

I want to be putting her down at around the same time during the day, maybe doing this will help her know that about 1030... it's nap time.

7. Tune out. 

We know she is blossoming into a social butterfly and with that certain things like the TV really catches her attention, so i suggest turning the TV of when trying to put them down for a nap. We can hear the TV from Avah's room and some days she really cranes her neck trying to listen to or see the TV.

8. Night time is boring time.

Try to keep stimulation to a 0 at night time so she doesn't start associating it with an opportunity to play.

9. Let her try to put herself back to sleep. 

We want her to be able to sleep. And like always, if she isn't crying for me, she doesn't need me. Just because I can see her moving on the monitor does not mean i'll be going to her.

Well there you have it. I'm so exhausted that something in this pile has to work right??

I'll get back to you to let you know how these things work for me!

UPDATE: FEB 14th, 2016

We have had utter success with our tactics. The first week employing our strategies was tough. Mostly because since I wasn't sleeping great at night I wanted nothing but to sleep in in the morning. But getting her up at the same time everyday really work. As a compromise, I pushed back the alarm an hour. Instead of setting my sights on 830 rise time I went with 930 and when things started getting better I worked it back to 9 then 830 where I had wanted to be originally.

Being clean and FED was really important. She was for sure hungry at times.

We also had to endure a little heart break at times and let her fidget a few times. Especially the first few days. I could hear that she was awake. She would start with chattering to herself then start yelling and possibly escalate to crying a little. I can tell her different types of cries. If I knew she was just crying for me instead of the MOM I SERIOUSLY NEED YOU cry. I just let her sit five minutes, if she was still yelling and whining for me I let her win. We got up and went straight to an activity. I started engaging her. And honestly usually on these days if I played and talked to her for half an hour, you could watch her get tired. After that she usually went down and stayed down. (**For naps during the day)

At night we tried really hard to maintain a dark room, quiet, boring. If everything was boring she didn't want to sleep. Cause who wants to be up in the boring night time to stare at the boring wall. LOL!. But we also made sure if we knew she wasn't hungry (i.e had just ate the previous time awake) we tried not to take her out of her room even. She got re-snuggled and put back to sleep. This is where patience wore thin sometimes. She does this crazy annoying thing, (lol) where she is so tired and relaxed that she has her eyes shut and starts to drift off then she realizes that she is falling asleep so she cries to wake herself up a little and 1/2 a second later back to my calm sleeping baby, over and over and over and over. When she did this we just had to wait it out. We also started setting her down when she was sleepy and surprisingly at night it was easier because the room was dark, nothing to look at. She would fidget a little get comfortable and put herself to sleep. During the day however she would roll over, look at stuff, look out the window. Anything to keep herself stimulated to be awake.

It was a slow month and a half. But i'm very happy to report we have had 3 consecutive days of 730-730. In fact this morning I was sore (since i'm breast feeding) and she was still sleeping at 8 so I may or may not have been a little louder in the kitchen trying to wake her a little.

We also timed her total sleep time and some days she would be sleeping 18 hours and at this age (not that it's a perfect estimation by any means) but typically they need 14-15 hours. And we would see this pattern, great naps and then poor nights. To fix this we would not let her sleep more then 2 hours at a time. If she was having three naps this could mean 6 hours of sleep during the day. If she got much more than this during the day it's understandable why certain days she maybe would get 7 hours over night in total, and that wasn't a habit we wanted to enforce.

Another big one was watching her like a hawk for sleep signs. As she got older they are becoming a lot more hidden. But once her eyes glaze over, it's nap time. But now she will rub her face and her eyes glaze and her eyes get red and she plays different. They sound like they should be a lot easier to see, but the thing is is that she can seem content but be tired where as before I knew it was nap time when she would fuss.

Now I know what your thinking. HA! three days it's all a rouse she'll go back to not sleeping. I've learned a few things on our journey. I know that 730-730 just isn't realistic for every night. But at the same time we went down to waking every hour or two. So i considered it a victory when she slept five in a row. Especially since I have a hard time getting back to sleep at night, sometimes she was up again before I could fall back asleep. Take the small victories, trust me.

A Few Tips & Tricks

1. Start with naps. No one has patience at night when your exhausted. And when your tired, your way less likely to stick to a routine. 

2. Shorten up naps to 1.5 -2.5 hours depending how many times your kids nap during the day.

3. Allow total day time sleeping to only be 1/4 of the appropriate sleep time for your child. I.E. For Avah right now average sleep time is 12-15 hours so I don't let her sleep more then 5 hours during the day in total. 

4. Examine your routine. Is it too complicated? When your frustrated are you just throwing it all out the window in a moment of helplessness?

5. Take the small victories. If you got three hours instead of two, take a deep breath and see this as progress.

6. Understand that it may take a looong time. 

7. And understand that, this too shall pass. At some point in your life your going to be looking back wishing you had this cute little baby to snuggle again. 

8. If things get bad where you become unhappy or grumpy, put life on pause for the day. Cut down to only necessities and lean on your partner. Is it important to you to get your baby and other kids dressed every day? Try a lazy day on the couch with your kids in jammies to have a little catch up day. And who knows maybe mom will sneak in a few minutes of blissful shut eye. 

9. Bust out the freezer meals. Nothing more annoying than having a tired baby, being tired and trying to make a meal. Freezer meals are a god send in this situation. 

10. Stick to your guns. You'll make it through. And the more conviction to a routine that works for you (whatever it may be) the more likely you are to see success in the end. And just know there will be days you will question EVERYTHING. And thats okay too :)