Thrown for a loop
Okay, has anyone ever heard of this?? And can you please tell me what the heck is going on??:
Daisy is now doing the most beautiful bedtime routine imaginable. It is almost stunning how perfect it is. She ASKS to go to bed. I nurse her, but only for the briefest time, and she usually doesn't even seem interested in a bottle now. She takes just a sip or two of it and then asks to go to bed. And all of this is happening in the living room, btw. Mark carries her to her crib and places her down in it, awake. She snuggles her monkey and gets comfortable and goes to sleep. It is UNBELIEVABLE.
Except night after night after night, she wakes up at midnight, screaming for us, and is totally inconsolable. Basically, we don't sleep between midnight and five, because it's back and forth, back and forth to Daisy. She only sleeps intermittently in that time, too. Last night she slept from 5 AM to 7:30, finally, and then was up for the day.
What is going on? Does anyone know? We have read in all our sleep books that problems like this tend to arise when you put a baby down in her crib asleep, and then she wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn't know how to soothe herself back to sleep, because she's so dependent on you to get to sleep and doesn't remember being placed in the crib. So to put a baby down in her crib awake and let her get herself to sleep is what all the books recommend. Okay, I know-- the books don't know everything, and I must sound terribly naive to be saying, "Why aren't things going according to the books?" It's just that when sleep problems have come up in the past, I've been able to find at least some solace in looking through the books for advice, and now I just feel like I'm out there in outer space with no idea what to do.
We do have a few theories. The most plausible explanation seems to be that this is somehow being caused by the huge milestone she just hit (walking-- and every day she's walking more and more confidently, and further and further away from us). Last night we noticed that in her efforts to get back to sleep, she seemed unable to stop fidgeting and tossing and turning. It was like her body was getting out of her control, and just needed to move. I'm thinking the new impulses to walk, along with her amazing cognitive/linguistic developments as of late, might be throwing her off in some way? I don't know. Or maybe she's having nightmares. It's just odd, how it always happens at exactly the same time (midnight, give or take ten minutes). And since she's so capable of going to sleep in the first place, why doesn't she soothe herself back to sleep when she wakes up in the middle of the night?
We're going on now almost a month of not sleeping much at night. It's kind of crazy, how I continue to function.
Daisy is now doing the most beautiful bedtime routine imaginable. It is almost stunning how perfect it is. She ASKS to go to bed. I nurse her, but only for the briefest time, and she usually doesn't even seem interested in a bottle now. She takes just a sip or two of it and then asks to go to bed. And all of this is happening in the living room, btw. Mark carries her to her crib and places her down in it, awake. She snuggles her monkey and gets comfortable and goes to sleep. It is UNBELIEVABLE.
Except night after night after night, she wakes up at midnight, screaming for us, and is totally inconsolable. Basically, we don't sleep between midnight and five, because it's back and forth, back and forth to Daisy. She only sleeps intermittently in that time, too. Last night she slept from 5 AM to 7:30, finally, and then was up for the day.
What is going on? Does anyone know? We have read in all our sleep books that problems like this tend to arise when you put a baby down in her crib asleep, and then she wakes up in the middle of the night and doesn't know how to soothe herself back to sleep, because she's so dependent on you to get to sleep and doesn't remember being placed in the crib. So to put a baby down in her crib awake and let her get herself to sleep is what all the books recommend. Okay, I know-- the books don't know everything, and I must sound terribly naive to be saying, "Why aren't things going according to the books?" It's just that when sleep problems have come up in the past, I've been able to find at least some solace in looking through the books for advice, and now I just feel like I'm out there in outer space with no idea what to do.
We do have a few theories. The most plausible explanation seems to be that this is somehow being caused by the huge milestone she just hit (walking-- and every day she's walking more and more confidently, and further and further away from us). Last night we noticed that in her efforts to get back to sleep, she seemed unable to stop fidgeting and tossing and turning. It was like her body was getting out of her control, and just needed to move. I'm thinking the new impulses to walk, along with her amazing cognitive/linguistic developments as of late, might be throwing her off in some way? I don't know. Or maybe she's having nightmares. It's just odd, how it always happens at exactly the same time (midnight, give or take ten minutes). And since she's so capable of going to sleep in the first place, why doesn't she soothe herself back to sleep when she wakes up in the middle of the night?
We're going on now almost a month of not sleeping much at night. It's kind of crazy, how I continue to function.
posted by Sarah Goss at 7:05 PM
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