As much as I liked having her in the bedroom, right there when she wanted to nurse, I knew it was time to make our bedroom ours again, and give her space of her own.  Maybe, I thought, if she woke up lightly from sleep and I wasn’t lying right there, she would soothe herself back to sleep.  And I mean, I missed having conversations with Chris as we snuggled into bed.

The first night was horrible, but in a really understandable way.  Having not really slept in the nursery in a long while, Maia woke up and freaked out over not knowing where she was.   It looks and smells different in there, and Mama & Dada aren’t right next to the crib… so every time she woke up (yep, every 1.5-2hrs) she would start sobbing in this deep, heart-wrenching, ohmigod I’m scared kind of way.  I felt horrible for her, but once I picked her up she would calm down quickly, and she only needed to nurse two of those times.

The second night was still a little rough, but less so; a few less wakings (already a victory!) and more of a complaining, angry tone to her cries (“really guys? you still have me in here?”) meant that overall, we all got more sleep.  I won’t lie, the fact that I have to get out of bed and walk into the other room, nurse her, and walk back to my bedroom is an annoyance, but it’s something I’m willing to deal with.

By the third night, we were down to her waking up thrice a night, and there is where we’ve generally stayed — and yes, this is a victory.  Maia goes to bed reliably at 7pm, nurses sometime between 9-11pm, wakes up at 1:30am and 5:30am for a feeding, then gets up for the day between 7 and 8am.   I would desperately like to eliminate that 9-11pm feeding, or barring that, the 1:30am one, but for now I’m stumped as to how to do that.  There are nights when she’ll skip one of those on her own, and once she even slept straight from 7pm-3am before wanting to nurse, so at least I know it’s something she can do.

My goal right now is to reliably get 6 hours of sleep in a row for myself.  I know that’s asking a lot, since it’s happened once and that was the night she wasn’t even home, but I would pretty much fall over myself with happiness.  I don’t usually go to bed til midnight, so if she were to wake up at 1am and then 7:30am, that’d be good enough for me.

Overall though, moving her into the nursery has been really successful and we’re all getting  more rest, which is important… especially because she DOESN’T STOP MOVING all day long!

I know, what a boring post, right?

My head is pounding, my eyes are aching, and my jaw hurts.  The last, if you know me, is indicative of the fact that I have a brutal headache.

It’s almost 3am and I type this one-handed through a burning haze of frustrated tears.  The other hand? It’s carrying Maia. She’s crying, too.

I’ve gotten less than one hour of unbroken sleep tonight. Hope your night is better.

3:30am: annnnd i’m so tired i failed to react quickly enough to her movement & she rolled right off the couch.  i fucking fail at this being a parent thing.

5:30am: well, she finally fell asleep at 4.  but now she’s wide awake again, rolling & raspberrying, and woke up once in the middle of this all to nurse as well.  what the fuck? i hate this.

My poor little child has become a restless monster at night. The girl who was going to bed quietly at 7:30 am and getting up at 7am with only one or two feedings is no more.

Last night:

7:30-8:30: fussy.

8:30-9: ear-piercingly fussy

9-11: Asleep.  Is it even worth pointing out that 11 is when we went to bed?  Nursed her back to sleep.

1am: Awake.  Brief nurse to sleep.

3am: Awake.  Brief nurse to sleep.

4am: Awake.  Brief nurse to sleep.

5am: Wakes up crying.  Pull her into bed, side-nurse while I try desperately to fall back to sleep.  This takes awhile for us both as she keeps crying quietly and nuzzling against me.

6am: Wakes up grunting and trying to roll over against me.  Very briefly nurse her to sleep, then lay her in the pack & play beside the bed where she usually sleeps, so she has more space.

7am: Awake and ready to get out of bed.

Fortunately, she reliably takes a nap about an hour after she gets up.  That nap lasts between 30 minutes and two hours.  However long it is, I am hopping in bed with her for it!  I’m completely exhausted.

Then I will display how the kismet of the universe plays out. I will sneak into her room, lie down on the floor (meaning I will have to shove all her clutter into a corner somewhere), and start flopping around and grunting. Maybe I’ll even suck loudly on my fist. I’ll continue this for a few minutes, increasingly loudly, until she rolls over and is like, “What the fudge, Mom? It’s like 5:30am. Go back to sleep.”

Rather than acknowledge or acquiesce to her perfectly reasonable request, I will fart at her before flopping around more insistently, and if she talks to me again I’ll either smile and squeal, or I’ll stare at her blankly as if to say “Are you talking to me? Seriously? How dare you!”

If she turns her back to me I’ll start to scream, and I won’t stop until she gets out of bed. Once she does, I will randomly stick my fingers in her eyes or nose or mouth for the next hour, while occasionally attempting to shove my toes into her belly button. The only thing that MAY relax me is if she walks around the house in endless circles with me, but even then, just when she’s been lulled into a sense of secure “Maybe I’ll get some sleep soon”, I’ll make sure to twitch wildly, shriek, and drool all over her shoulder.

Until, inexplicably, I collapse into sleep in the most contorted position possible, wherever and whenever I feel like it, because dammit all, I’m tired and I want to sleep and how dare she not realize that.

That day will be awesome.
familymotherhoodparentingbabyfunny

Something that makes me sad is the fact that if I were in the US, my maternity leave would be ending.  I can’t imagine leaving Maia with a sitter right now — hell, I miss her when she’s just in the other room with her daddy.

Chris talked to MJ, his mother, the other day about how Maia is sleeping in the bed, and now is on a mission to get her back in the bassinet.  I told him I’m willing to compromise — we’ll put her down in the bassinet at the beginning of the night, but if she wakes up at some ungodly hour and refuses to sleep again in the bassinet, I’m putting her in the bed.  He said she needed to stay in the bassinet.  I said “Then you get to take care of her if she won’t lie down, and I’m going to sleep.”

So that night, we lay her in the bassinet for the night and she sleeps, then she’s up at 2:30 for a feeding.  I feed her, she falls asleep easily, I put her in the bassinet and she sleeps.  She’s up at 4:30, but after nursing and changing, she’s wide awake and doesn’t want to go back to sleep.  For an hour, I stay up with her in the dark and calm her down; she starts settling, closes her eyes, and her limbs go limp against me.  I try to set her down in the bassinet — she cries.  Another ten minutes of soothing, she sleeps; I put her down, she fusses.  Another ten minutes.  Same thing.  So I wake Chris up and say “Guess what, it’s your turn, she won’t sleep in the bassinet for me.”

Now, I could easily have solved this by putting her in the bed with us and letting her sleep there, but the point of this was to make him understand that when it comes to Maia, right now, I KNOW BETTER THAN HE DOES.  “She’s not crying,” he says.  “She will,” I say, “and so you should grab her and calm her now before she upsets herself too much.”  “No, she’ll soothe herself back to sleep,” he says.

A few minutes of fussing later, she starts crying (and I smile).  Chris takes her and walks out of the bedroom, and I see a light go on.  Whatever, I fall back asleep.  I wake up when I hear her cry again, and I decide to go check on them.  Chris has all the lights on and is watching television. When I ask him what he’s doing, he gets pissed off and says he’s obviously taking care of her.  I said he should obviously be trying to soothe her back into sleep instead of stimulating her with all these lights and sounds.  He replies something very nasty that I won’t type here, but it makes me decide that he deserves whatever the fuck he’s doing to himself, and I go back to bed.

Two hours later (I’m impressed at this length of time) he comes into the bedroom and wakes me up.  “She’s been awake the whole time,” he says, “you need to feed her, I’m done.”

So I laid her down between us in the bed and nursed her.  It was 7:45am at that time.  When we woke up, it was 11:30am.

And when she woke up in the middle of the night last night to feed, I took her out of the bassinet, laid her between us, nursed her, and we slept like that.  He hasn’t said a word about it.

Because, yes, I know best.

The problems I found were these: first, we were both soaking wet.  I assume my boobs leaked all over her and me when she fell asleep while feeding.  Second, lying on my side still bugs my left hip, regardless of which side I sleep on although it takes longer to be irritated when I’m on my right.  Third, unless I roll her and myself around, she’s always going to be feeding off the same side when we’re in bed.  This isn’t too big of an issue, except for the fact that I’m paranoid to have her lying anywhere other than between Chris and I, in the middle of the bed.

Still, I am looking forward to trying her in bed the whole night again and seeing if I can replicate last night’s success or even improve upon it.  Chris is still asleep so I can’t ask him what he thought of it — hopefully he considers it as positive of an experience as I do.

We’ve been co-sleeping again, because she sleeps well (and so do I) like that.  Last week she stayed in the bassinet pretty much all week, except for daytime naps when she and I would snuggle in bed, but it really seems like during the last few days she just does not want to be away from her mommy and daddy.  If she’s fussy and either of us picks her up, she quiets right down, snuggles up against us (or, okay, we pull her against us!), and falls right back asleep.  Last night she got sleepy pretty late, around 1am, and I tried to lay her in the bassinet.  She slept for about 15 minutes, then got fussy; Chris picked her up and took her out to lay on his chest on the couch, and they slept together there for awhile.  I don’t remember him bringing her back into the bedroom or what time it was, but apparently I breastfed her and we fell asleep, because I woke up around 3:30am sitting against my headboard with Maia having slid down my front and sleeping sitting up between my legs with her head settled on my stomach.  Hilarious!

So after another little feeding and changing her, I tried to put her back into the bassinet — no dice.  FIVE TIMES IN A ROW I tried to put her back in the bassinet after she fell asleep in my arms, with limp limbs and calm, deep breaths to indicate she was truly asleep, but she kept waking up.  Finally I rolled onto my side, laid her next to me, and fed her — after a very few sucks, she broke the latch and fell asleep, so I slept with her.  And we slept for hours.  It was beautiful.

Of course, right now she’s actually sleeping in her swing, after having fallen asleep in the Baby Bjorn.  Maybe if I could stay awake after she falls asleep in the bed or on the couch with me, I could move her into the bassinet. (which I love — it’s this one)  But really, the time when she’ll want to be in bed with us will be short (or the time that I’ll want her in bed with us!), and I might as well enjoy it.

A few hours ago, we had a minor meltdown chez moi, in which I pretty much lost my shit over the fact that she would cry any time one of us was not holding her — even when I’d soothe her to sleep, as soon as I laid her down, no matter how deeply asleep she was, she’d wake up.  Finally I laid her in her bassinet, walked out, closed the door, and let her scream while I made and ate some lunch.  I felt like an absolutely horrible person, knowing that if I just picked her up she’d be comforted and stop crying, but at the same time I don’t think it’s reasonable to hold my child 99% of her awake time.

Of course, when I finally finished as much of my lunch as I could stomach and went into the bedroom (I honestly can’t tell you how long she cried for, because it felt like forever, but since I had a PB&J sandwich for lunch it couldn’t have been that long) … I picked her up and we sat there sobbing quietly against one another, her head on my shoulder.  Chris followed me and took her, which was good, because I needed a Kleenex.

We also tried a pacifier today for the first time.  I really did not want to give it to her, but Chris, Maia, and I were all so frustrated with one another that I decided to give it a try.  Our latch is pretty much perfected so far as I can tell, and using the pacifier would be a rarity anyhow.  I got teary-eyed as Chris tried to get her to take the pacifier, and when she rejected it I felt so relieved — except for the fact that she got SO ANGRY over it not being a real nipple (she spit out the pacifier, screwed her face up so tightly that her lips went white, and screeeeeeamed), which then made me feel like a meanie for trying to deny my daughter her desires.

Phew.  This parenting thing is tough.