It has been a LONG week. I don't know what the matter is with Ellie, but she's suddenly and inexplicably stopped sleeping at night. Generally I can't get her to sleep until 10pm and those nights where she does go down closer to her 7pm bedtime (like tonight), she's back up again within hours and won't go back to sleep. Tonight she went to bed around 8pm and woke up at 10:30pm...she's been up and crying since then. I feel like I've tried every trick in the book. Tonight alone I've tried giving her an extra bottle, singing to her, rocking her, walking with her, bringing her in our bed, putting on the TV, letting her play for a while, letting her cry for a while, and driving around the neighborhood a couple of times (and got stuck on the wrong side of the road at one point - apparently they need to cone off 3 miles of road for the 20ft they're currently doing construction on). All this has been going on for about a week and a half now and it just does not seem to be getting any better. I can her how exhausted she is in her cries.
I'm hoping she just cries herself out soon, because it's been a long week in more ways than one and I'm just completely physically and emotionally drained at this point. I've taken on some commitments at church, so I haven't been making up for any of this missed sleep with naps because I've been working on that stuff while Ellie naps. I'm just so tired, and I just want to crawl in bed and cry right now. I hate listening to her cry like this, it breaks my heart. But NOTHING else is working. And she's always been so easy to put to bed that I really haven't ever had to do any sleep training with her. Tomorrow, though, I'm going to nap when she naps and start doing Ferber with her. From what I've read, it takes approximately 4 days before the baby will go right to sleep when put to bed. I wish this phase would just break and she'd just go back to sleeping well, but since we're going on two weeks now, I think it's time to try something else.
1 comment:
Sounds like exactly what Harper is doing. She pushed her bedtime back to around midnight a couple weeks ago - we're guessing it is teething related, but it's stuck so I also think it's become a habit. Like you, we've tried lots of different things - cutting naps short during the day, waking her up really early, doing CIO, co-sleeping, etc. and so far it's not working. Most of the time our ideas have backfired - like the whole waking up early thing? Well since I had to wake up early with her (after a late night) when she took her nap that day, I accidentally fell asleep too and we slept for like 4-5 hours. Big fat whoops! Or letting her CIO earlier to see if she'll just go to bed - and all it will be is a late nap and then she's up REALLY late. There was one night I couldn't get her down til 3am!
I have gotten it moved back from as late as 1-2am to 11:30pm and I'm hoping that I can get it closer to 11 tonight. She hasn't napped today (mostly because we haven't let her) and so I'm hoping I can hold her off a bit longer and see if she'll go down around 10:30? Wishful thinking maybe.
I've also tried doing a consistent routine. Bath or shower with a massage & lavendar lotion, jammies, warm milk in her sippy with some teething tablets and then cuddle with her giraffe & blankie while watching a lullaby video every night. But if she's not ready to go to sleep, she won't. Very frustrating!
I wish I had more advice, but it just seems to be some sort of phase. I think this next weekend we're going to try the getting up early thing every morning and try and avoid long naps...it's just hard when it means very little sleep for me too, especially after this past week of rough sleep with teething (not only the late bedtime, but waking up a couple times each night). But, it has to be done! We're leaving her overnight in a couple of weeks with my aunt & uncle and I'd really prefer for her not to have a midnight bedtime then!
Let me know if you find anything that works for you, too!
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