Lucy, the love and light of my life, has many good qualities. Her little personality is developing so much. She is so smart and strong and wonderful. However, sleep is not her thing. She is a
terrible sleeper. Pretty much from the beginning, she has had sleep issues. She hated to be on
her back for the first 6 weeks of her life. So she slept in her swing. Then, we tried to get her to sleep in her bassinet. No dice. We tried to get her to sleep in her crib. No dice. Bassinet again. Nope. Finally, we ended up letting her sleep in our bed. Not ideal and none of us were happy with it, but at least she was sleeping. A few weeks ago, we decided we needed to move her back to her crib. In preparing to go back to work, I needed her to be in her crib or else I was afraid she would be 6 months old before we could make the move!
We used to put Lucy down between 9 and 10 - basically around the time we were winding down for the night. Even when sleeping in our bed, she would scream throughout her last nursing session of the night - pulling on and off, fussing, grunting, crying. It really wasn't pleasant for anyone and I felt so bad that the end of my poor baby's day was so traumatic. After doing some reading and internet searching, I decided that we were letting her get overtired. She always always always want(ed) to take a nap between 630 and 7 - and we would wake her up so she would "go to bed." Then the fussing and crankiness would ensue. Light bulb moment - she was ready for bed, not a nap! We started doing her bedtime routine at the first signs of tiredness and she is so much more fun to put to sleep now! No more screaming - just eating and rocking! Love it!
One hurdle crossed - but we still have major problems. Lucy will sleep from 7-10 (actually the past two nights she was woken up half an hour after going down and then we had to do the whole rock/nurse thing again!) but after 10 she has been waking up every.single.hour. Seriously - every hour between 10 and 6. Holy exhausting! Everyone at the T household is running on fumes. We swaddle her, we play white noise, she has a velour crib sheet, her mattress is inclined - what more can we do? It is frustrating, to say the least. She isn't waking up hungry
(she eats maybe two or three of those EIGHT wakings) but she is definitely waking up crying. We try just rubbing her tummy or quietly letting her know we are there, but if we don't pick her up, her cries escalate to all out wails - which increases the amount of time we are all awake.
Poor Lucy :( Last night, Andrew put our sleep position wedge thing in her crib around 130, and that bought us a 3 hour stretch! We will definitely be trying that again tonight in hopes that we can all get more sleep!
Even though our nights are long, our days with Lucy are so much fun. She is smiling at everything and learning new things every day. She still hates her carseat and stroller, so there's a good chance that Lucy is going to get her "big girl" carseat this weekend! We think she might like it better because it sits a little more upright, and our monkey is always trying to sit up! It can be rear facing for up to 40 pounds, too, so I think she will still be perfectly safe!
We are sadly getting ready for the end of my maternity leave, but we still feel very lucky to have found such a great nanny! Do you think she will have fun with this little girl or what? :)
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