SILVER CAN PUT HERSELF TO SLEEP!

Alright, alright.  I know it's probably not too impressive since she's now over a year old.  But for this sleep deprived mama, this is BIG news.  Huge.  Silver has hated sleep from the get-go.  I mean, really just despised the whole sleeping process.  She wails while I rock her because she knows I'm trying to get her to go to sleep.  She'll wail in her crib once I've put her down.

Tuesday, July 12 marks the start of something new and amazing (it's been a full week since then so I feel like it's maybe "safe" to say that and I'm hopefully not jinxing myself :)

We did our usual nighttime routine of Mr. T rocking Silver to sleep, and then she did her all too usual, no, I'm not going to stay asleep once the rocking stops and I'm out of your arms - which is incredibly frustrating to say the very least.  So then I think I gave it a go, and T.J. maybe gave it another go.  And then we decided, this is just ridiculous. She's obviously tired.  Why does she have to fight so hard?  Let's just see what she does.  And so the crying began.  I just kept staring at the monitor and willing Silver to sleep.  Longest five minutes that ever was.  But she fell asleep.  On her own.

This is how she fell asleep
She's on the right side with her hiney up in the air.  :)

Later that night after she woke up, shortly after I had just nursed her and gotten her back down, my sleep deprivation decided we really needed to get this figured out.  So, instead of picking her back up, I grabbed my pillow and a blanket, made her lay back down and I laid down right next to her crib on the floor.  Oh, I think she cried for probably fifteen minutes.  It was terrible.  But I was right there and I knew she was okay and I had just nursed her right before this.  So I talked to her and kept tapping the mattress with my hand through the bars, trying to get her to lay down (because at this point she was standing back up holding the bars as if her crib was her own personal jail cell and she had been terribly wronged).  Crying on and off, she eventually settled down and then fell asleep while staring at me.

And I think that's what did it.

Silver learned how to fall asleep without being rocked, held, or having her back rubbed.

Each night this week, during a couple of her nightly wakeups she has managed to put herself back to sleep after just a minute of unhappy noises.  I'll be getting ready to head down the hall, when she stops.  Bliss.

And, just before I started typing this Silver woke up from her all too short 35 minute nap for just a minute and went back to sleep not even crying.  I just heard some little noises on the monitor and thought, ugh, worst napper ever, and of course there she was, standing.  But as I watched she sat back down, rolled onto her tummy and BAM!  Back out.  Amazing, it was.

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP.  This mama is going to be bragging about a full night of sleep SOON.  :)  Okay, maybe not bragging.  I know she is a year old and some babies are doing this at like, I don't know, 3 months or something crazy awesome like that.  But everyone's different and that just hasn't been us.  And I just don't believe in the shutting the door and not going back in there till morning business.  Or even really crying it out.  Which is why it has been so hard for us and I'm sure some moms think I'm just crazy for not having done that this late in the game.  But... we're getting things figured out in our own time.  :)

Einstein Never Slept

Some days when I try to get Silver down for a nap I am convinced that DHS is going to show up at my door at any given moment.  Why?  Because Silver is not, nor has she ever really been, a good sleeper.  Our 'routine' of late involves me letting her scream her head off for a bit in attempts to put herself to sleep.

Other days, I am convinced that someone else on our block has the same video monitor we do and has picked up our signal.  The mom is watching us, shaking her head at our situation and 'tsk, tsk-ing', while judging me.  She's probably even calling her stay at home mom friend up to talk about me.  "Can you believe this mom is just letting her baby cry like that?!  Listen (Holds monitor up to phone)."  I'm not even kidding. I really feel she's out there.

I am not a fan of letting Silver cry it out.  And I don't believe in the cry it out method.  To be honest, I think the Baby Wise method is entirely crazy because when babies cry it's because they need something.  But when I KNOW Silver's exhausted because she's 'sung her sleepy song' as I call it, she's not hungry, she's had a diaper change, and she is merely pissed off at the world (or probably just me), because she can't fall asleep, what else am I left to do?  She has to figure it out.  Because when I rock her, she just wails (while trying to latch on to me through my shirt).  When I nurse her, she falls asleep and the second I go to lay her down, we're back to wailing.  So she has to figure it out.

I'm a researcher at heart.  I've read most of The No-Cry Sleep Solution.  I've started reading The Happiest Baby on the Block, and even have the DVD set to ship to me on our next video queue... I've read about sleeping solutions on quite a few blogs and parenting websites.  All of which were extremely helpful and filled with the most fantastic ideas... yet don't seem to be working for us just yet.  But we're working on it.  We've been working on it.

The second Silver wipes her eyes, gives a yawn, or buries her head in my chest it's go time.  I'm not even kidding.  I practically sprint to her crib.  No, not really, but time is definitely of the essence.  And some days Silver actually goes to sleep without putting up a fight.  Those days are little miracle days where I do an oh my goodness, freak out with excitement dance, while looking into the video monitor, smiling with awe and joy at the miraculousness.

What did I do to make that go so well?  Is it because we played on her bouncer instead of on her play mat before heading to her crib?  Is it because she is swaddled extra perfectly?  Maybe the little musical soother played the most perfect combination of classical music and rainforest sounds.  Perhaps it was that the sun was a little overcast so it's darker in her room...  All of the factors can drive a mama crazy.  I've become ritualistic and don't even know for sure what my rituals are.

She usually eventually does figure it out.  Sometimes it's after just a couple minutes of yelling at me.  Sometimes, on the bad days, like today, it's been an entire hour of her trying to work it out with me intermittently checking on her so she knows she hasn't been abandoned.  I'm probably going to have to go in there and let her think she's won.  We'll try to play for a little bit, but she will be so darn grumpy, we'll go straight back to her crib, where she will probably quickly cave.  And when she does cave, it is so bizarre, she will go from screaming, with her eyes squeezed tight, to silence with the sweetest sleeping face you've ever seen.  You wouldn't think it was the same baby who had been screaming in protest just moments before.

My mom gets Silver to fall asleep without much fighting almost every time she watches her.  Although my mom does have to work her magic.  She tells me she thinks that Silver must just be a genius, like Einstein, who never slept... And I love her for that.  Finding the beauty in our exhausting situation.  All I know, is that eventually Silver will learn to fall asleep without hating me and every second of our 'routine'.  Because she has to.  And, I now more than EVER cherish those beautiful moments, from the time she was maybe about 2 months, until she was about 3 months old.  When she would sing herself to sleep at any given moment and actually take naps.  Lots of naps.  Beautiful, glorious, angelic naps.  And she even slept. through. the. night...

Sweet Sleeper

Oh my gosh.  Silver has become the cutest sleeper ever.  She 'talks' herself to sleep.  I am doing something I didn't think I would do though... we've become pretty reliant on the swing.  And by "pretty reliant" I mean it's mandatory and God bless the person that invented it.  :)  Silver is not such a fan of going to sleep and this really seems to be working for us right now.  And, since a mama can only handle so much, the swing it is!