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.  :)