Sleeping

Today was just One of Those Days. Actually, yesterday was too. Meg has been slowly giving up naps for awhile at, unfortunately, quite a young age. My mother tells me I did the same thing. Apparently by the time she was pregnant with my sister (who was born when I was 23 months), I didn’t nap anymore. She got morning sickness and lost naptime at the same time. Ugh.

Anyway, Meg hates to take naps and she doesn’t always need one. If she starts the day well rested, she can go all day without a nap. She’ll probably need one the next day, though. And will NOT want to take it. She has become more and more stubborn the older she gets. At this point, she’s actually kind of insufferable. She wants what she wants, and SHE WANTS IT NOW, DAMMIT. Fortunately, my baby doesn’t actually swear. But she gets her point across quite nicely. Our biggest problem is that she can’t talk. She is very, very insistent when she wants something (roughly every 2 minutes), but she can’t tell me what she wants. She gets frustrated, I get frustrated, and no one is happy.

She has also taken to screaming at the top of her lungs if we so much as walk by her crib. Apparently, the crib is the worst form of torture. If it was just naptime, we could handle it. But now, she screams bloody murder at bedtime, too. An “I am NEVER going to calm down” kind of scream. Cry it out does not work, because she is not simply winding down. She is pissed at us for daring to put her in bed and, no matter how tired she gets, she will remain on her feet screaming through the sheer force of her rage.

We have tried everything. Sometimes we let her scream and go in every 5-10 minutes. Doesn’t work. Sometimes its so obvious that leaving her alone is not going to work that I sit there rocking her for an hour or more. She’ll sit there, but she won’t go back in her crib no matter how long we’ve been rocking. Sometimes we let her get up and play longer. So far, that works best. We are very seriously considering pushing her bedtime back to 9:00. But that leaves us practically no time alone and, on workdays, she has to get up at 6 am. I just don’t think that’s enough sleep. And since she has a firm “I hate naps” policy, I think she should get as much sleep as possible. BUT, she hasn’t been getting to sleep until at least 9 now (her bedtime is 8). However, I’m worried that if we start putting her to bed at 9, she won’t be asleep until 10, and then we’re really in trouble.

Wow. This post was supposed to be about TODAY and it turned into ramblings about sleep.

Short version: she hasn’t been napping and she doesn’t talk yet, so even when she really, really wants something (which is all the time), she can’t tell us, SO she has been a terror the last two days and even with TWO parents today, we couldn’t handle her. Today kicked our asses.