The girl has been sleeping like a champ. She's been going to bed by herself at 8 every night and waking up consistently between 7-8am. She's been napping for an hour every day around the noon hour. Very predictable. Things have been good. It's not taking us 1-3 hours of rocking and holding and gently placing her sleeping self in the crib. We read a couple of books, she gets tired and points to her crib, where we lay her down with her eyes open and leave the room. She drifts off to sleep peacefully and we have some sense of progress.
This is liberating! This is how it should be, right? She is evolving! She doesn't sleep 13 or 15 hours a day like some kids, and she still comes into our bed sometimes, but in general we are all ok with this new development. I've even been thinking that this could possibly leave a little time to exercise or talk to my husband in the evening.
Well, until last week when her nap started to go awry. Instead of 12 or even 1, it slipped to more like 2 or 3. Not that great. Her bedtime, though, seemed to still be reasonable and she was sleeping by 8:30.
Today the camel's back broke. I don't know what happened to her, but she would not nap to save her life. Not at the regular time, not at her later time, not in the car after two tries, and not on a long stroller ride. Eventually there was a lot of crying from exhaustion (hers, not mine, although I felt like it), red-rimmed eyes and zombie walking. We thought for sure she'd go to sleep like a bag of rocks, as she usually does when she misses a nap.
Nope. She was chipper and lively after her bath, pointing at everything and chattering like a crazy person with a binky in her mouth. Together we spent about 2 hours trying to hold her until sleepy, and every time we put her in the crib she would scream so intensely we thought she would throw up. We'd pick her back up, and she'd melt into us, relax, and nearly drift off. We tried not to pick her up and just let her cry, but it was like an insane crazy torture nightmare like nothing we had ever seen from her before. What. The. Hell. Is. Going. On?
Does this mean that all of the months of our good habit sleep training is out the window? Are we going to have to go to sleep with her every night again after hours of struggling and frustration? Are we doomed, or is this just an anomoly? Is she just crazy and this is the first symptom, or is she just going through some mysterious toddler hormone thing? Also, WHY is this happening?
This is the hardest part of parenting, I think, so far. The not having any idea WHY something is happening, what did we do to contribute to it, and if it can be fixed. I am told by my encouraging therapist that I practice "positive psychology", so I'm going to try really hard to do that here, as baffled and bummed as I am that this is happening.
I'm going to send up a little prayer that things will be just fine and our little lady will be relaxed, rested, mentally stable and happy in her life, starting real soon. Tomorrow would be great.
Oh, No! Sometimes I think they do these weird off pattern/trend things when they are developing new skills. All those words trying to develop may have done it, but your right, you'll never really know why and that is ROUGH!! Fingers crossed she'll return to her normal sleeping self this week and I have high hopes she will.
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