Progress, there and back.

Today, for the first time, Addy opened her mouth and let the food in. So far introducing solids has been a losing battle, for the poor food splattered and wasted all over the three of us and the living room, for me, who usually gets frustrated after ten minutes of forced-feeding and gives up, and for Addy, the reigning queen of the household, who never gets angrier than when she's doing something she doesn't want to do.

But today, her mouth opened to welcome the spoonful of mushed bananas, and almost half of the food made it into her mouth.

Progress.

And while one part of her baby story moves forward, another takes a giant step back.

I've only dabbled in sleep-training research up until this point, because we never really needed it. We'd have bad nights where I'd find myself googling MAKE MY BABY SLEEP at three a.m., and also nights like the one when I made an impulse purchase of The No Cry Sleep Solution on Amazon. But for the most part Adelyn's sleep would regulate itself before I had a chance to get too involved. (I read two chapters of that book before I put it down for something non-baby related.) Sometimes all the baby literature is just too much for me. The theories, the schedules, the opinions--the heated opinions. I don't want to follow a regimen. I don't have the energy to document every second of Adelyn's schedule for the professionals at Baby Center to consult. I don't have the strength to listen to Adelyn cry for long without doing something. Letting your baby cry until they finally fall asleep, without any intervention, is called "extinction." "Extinction crying."

No. No, and no. Nothing involving the word "extinction"--no matter how well some people swear it works--will be used in this house. (I'm not knocking anyone who does this, by the way. If there's one thing I've learned it's that every baby is different, and every mother is different, and not one is better than the other. But seriously, couldn't some pr-brained person find a better way to market the method than "extinction?")

We took the Nap Nanny away on Monday. Cold turkey. Comfy footed sleepers, beloved Sleep Sheep white noise maker, cuddling, lavender massage, vigorous bedtime guitar playing, lights out.

Jason and I approached it like preparing for battle. In shifts. One of us downstairs, one of us upstairs in bed, so that at least one of us was getting a chunk of sleep.

On Monday we put her to bed at 7:30. We took turns going in her room and comforting her at ten minute intervals, only picking her up when the crying turned into screams. We did this until about midnight (and, yes, she cried off and on for that long). Then I went to sleep, and Jason stood guard until three. When the alarm went off they were both asleep. I woke Jason up so he could go get in bed, and he told me she had never fallen asleep. He fed her, comforted her at least every ten minutes, picked her up, soothed her, sang to her, loved her.

She stayed asleep until five in the morning, and after a quick bottle slept for another twenty minutes.

Last night was a slight improvement. After about thirty minutes of comforted crying (going in the room every ten minutes), she slept until one. Then all it took was a few pats on the stomach and she slept again until four, then a quick fuss and up for the day at five.

We put her to bed fifteen minutes ago and she hasn't fallen asleep yet. I'm not sure if this post makes any sense at all, because my whole body is wrapped up in the sound of her crying over the monitor. I've already interrupted writing this twice to go upstairs and calm her down. And I haven't slept more than five hours since the Nap Nanny--the evil, evil, evil Nap Nanny--was recalled Monday morning.

Adelyn sleeps so much better on her stomach. I've been letting her do this for naps, when she's monitored, because she falls asleep with ease and wakes up happy. But I'm too scared to do it at night, when Jason and I are snoring and my maternal alarm is momentarily turned off. I even called Adelyn's doctor today to ask for her opinion, and she agreed: no nighttime sleeping on the stomach until she rolls into that position herself.

For now, I think I'll take a big swig out of my glass of wine. And maybe give The No Cry Sleep Solution another read, while I sit in a bubble bath and take a few more swigs.

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Four Month Sleep Regression

It's been a few days since I've written, and I wish I had an exciting excuse as to why.

Really, it's just that I am so tired.

I've never been much of a sleeper. I don't sleep in; I secretly (or not so secretly, I guess) don't understand the appeal of snoozing the day away. At sleepovers growing up I was always the first one awake, laying there, bored, antsy, staring at the ceiling, waiting for my friends to get up.

Jason, on the other hand, needs his sleep. He'll sleep until late into the afternoon if he can. But if I have absolutely nothing on the agenda, even pre-Adelyn, I can't turn my mind off once it snaps awake at seven.

I don't think I realized just how crucial that sleep is, though. Until it's taken away from me. During the beginning of our parenting life I don't think I was sleeping more than thirty minutes at a time, but I was so wrapped up in the newness of everything I didn't let it get to me. I hardly remember it now. It's just a blur of shuuusssshhhing, rocking, swaddling and breast-feeding all hours of the night.

But then, like magic, Adelyn started sleeping with the same ease as her dad. The amazing pattern started when she was around one and a half months old. She'd go to bed at 7:30 or 8 and sleep solidly until 6:30, sometimes 7:30, a few times even until 8. And that lasted until, oh, last weekend.

Now, it's taking an hour or more to get her to fall asleep. The minute Jason and I shut her door she starts crying again, and I go immediately back in and try to comfort her. When that doesn't work I pick her up, and she immediately belches like a frat boy who overdosed on foamy keg beer. I don't know where this sudden, intense gas is coming from. Nothing else in her life has changed.

After several rounds of that, she'll finally pass out for good. And then she'll sleep until three a.m., sometimes four, usually five. It's gone from 8-7 to 10-3.

For the record, I'm not going to let her cry it out. I've let her cry--more like fuss--for a few minutes before, and it always leads to a choking, gag, GET-ME-THE-HELL-OUT-OF-HERE-sort of melt-down. For her and for me. And I don't understand how letting them cry it out will ever solve whatever's ailing them. It seems to me that it would just teach them that no one, not mommy or daddy, is coming to get them. And that thought breaks my still-hormonal heart.

And the thing is, since her nighttime sleep has gone AWOL, her daytime pattern has become infinitely better. There's very little crying during the day now. Just a lot of babbling and giggling and napping.

Jason is in Memphis for his bachelor party this weekend, so I'm going it alone. And I'm tired. It's six in the morning and Adelyn is finally back asleep (in her swing), and I'm sitting in the recliner, tired and defeated. There's no point in catching a few more zzzz's now.

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Night Terror.

I think I bragged a little too much about our incredible sleeping baby. Adelyn spent the last week sleeping in consistent six, sometimes seven and a half hour stretches, and I let this fact be known. To everyone. People who asked and people who could care less.

Sleeping through the night is like the newborn holy grail. There are those women, the ones on BabyCenter or whatever forum, who just casually say, "Oh, she's just such a good sleeper. It just happened naturally." And when you've been up since three in the morning and have formula powder all over your pajama pants--the same ones you've been wearing for three days straight--or two huge wet spots on your shirt where your milk is leaking and you forgot to put in new breast pads, you want to take those women by the shoulders and shake them until that smug grin or emoticon wipes off their faces. Maybe this is just the sleep deprivation talking. But that's what I want to do to myself, two days ago, back when I thought I just might've figured the nighttime riddle out early.

We put her in her nursery for the first time on Saturday. I didn't think I'd be ready to put her in her own room this soon, but I realized I was barely sleeping, even when I was, since I could hear every one of her little grunts and snores. And her nursery is just steps away from our bedroom.

The first night we had her home, and I was in the depths of a sleep deprivation I hope I'll never find myself in again, we laid her in the Pack 'N Play and nervously tried to shut our eyes. I really couldn't, though. I tried to sleep on the side facing away from her, because otherwise I would have just stared at this strange, unpredictable creature I'd created snoring next to me. So, instead, I asked Jason every ten minutes if she was okay. Rather than turning over and looking for myself. If I looked, I'd want to stand up, go over to her, put my finger under her nose to make sure she was really breathing. I tortured Jason for at least two hours, making him sit up to look. And then, finally, the sun was up and neither of us had slept.

Six weeks later I've gotten oh-so-much better at just letting go of watching over her.

The first night she slept in her crib was that magical night where she slept for seven and a half hours, and I naively thought I'd stumbled upon that parenting holy grail so many blindly grasp at for months, even years.

I don't know what I was like when I was Adelyn's age; I do know, however, that I struggled for way too long with a need to sleep with my parents. I had an insanely active imagination as a kid, one where vindictive skeletons were rattling around in my kitchen and that distant beeping noise from the leaving room was a bomb a team of Nazis had assembled. I spent years trying to sleep by myself without concocting these wild fantasies. My parents tried everything; they bribed me to sleep through the night on my own, rationalized with me, explained the unlikelihood of Nazis in Middle Tennessee. I don't even remember when it stopped. Actually, I don't know if it ever did. I've just learned to better ignore the fear and focus on sleep.

I don't want Adelyn to go through the same thing. Not that it's preventable. The only thing my parents ever did wrong was encourage me to read and imagine as much as possible. But now that I have a child of my own and I get to try to fix whatever was wrong with my own childhood in her, I want to start early.

So at six weeks, she was going to sleep in her crib like a big girl.

Last night. Oh, last night. Jason and I gave her a bath (which she loves). We sang to her. Read to her. Swaddled her. Fed her one last time. She fell asleep at 11. At 2:30, I heard her crying over the monitor. I woke up, warmed her bottle, fed her with all the lights off. She ate four ounces and then burped like a champ. And then proceeded to cry for four more hours.

Nothing was working.

It got to the point I had hoped, prayed, it would never get to. When absolutely nothing was calming her and the screeching was starting to ricochet through my brain like nails down a chalkboard. I put her back in her crib. Turned off the lights. Shut the door. I walked outside to my back porch for exactly five minutes. I hope this doesn't qualify as "crying it out"; that really wasn't my intention. I just needed a minute--or five--to quiet myself.

When I went back upstairs, she was fast asleep.

Two hours later, I heard the crying again. I had just fallen back to sleep myself. She was fed and burped, and has now been asleep for three and a half hours.

I need a nap.

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