Analie used to be a professional sleeper.  The child would go down at 6:30 and we wouldn’t hear a peep out of her until 7am.  Like clockwork.  Every day.

And then last week happened.

It’s like there’s a “Bad Sleeper” switch in her room that I accidentally bumped when I was putting away her clothes or something, because BAM – suddenly she’s awake every couple of hours (or every hour during some parts of the night) fussing and screaming in a way that’s totally unlike her.  I try not to give her any medicine during the day, but I do give her Tylenol or Advil at night to help her sleep.

Can you imagine what she’d be like without that?

We are pretty sure that I can see the tops of a couple teeth on her bottom gums, and Joey thinks he might see some on her top gums too (ACK!), but I noticed them nearly a week ago.  And the teeth STILL.HAVE.NOT.COME.THROUGH.

I’m tired.

Yesterday she refused to eat.  Hopefully we do not repeat the same cycle today.

I am pretty sure this is just a stage, and we’re trying so hard not to get ourselves into an “accidental parenting” rut to get Analie back to sleep during the night.

And that’s what’s happening at the Woestman house.

I know, right?  Who misplaces their baby???

Maybe I should back up.

Last night, I was exhausted.  I would say that I was “three sheets to the wind”, but I recently learned that means drunk as a skunk.  WHO KNEW.  That’s one of those things I wish I would have learned about ten years ago; I would have said I was “three sheets to the wind” a whole lot less.

So we have established that I was really tired.

I finally dragged myself (and Joey’s iPad) into bed about 10:30, where I got frustrated with Angry Birds because I COULD! NOT! KILL! THESE! TWO! STUPID! PIGS!  That’s when I decided it was time to go to sleep.  Usually when I get irrationally angry about killing some pixel pigs, it’s time for bed.

At 12:30 am, I sat straight up in bed.

Because suddenly I couldn’t find the baby.

I thought I remembered Joey leaving her somewhere in our room on the floor, or maybe in the bed?, so tiptoed carefully around the floor and checked the corners to see if she was there.  She wasn’t.  So…Joey must have left her in the bed, right?  I threw my pillow on the floor and felt all around the sheets on my side of bed.

Nothing.

Hmm.  Maybe she was over on Joey’s part.

I threw back the comforter and patted every square inch of the bed.  A few times I thought I had found her, but each time it wound up being, like, Joey’s leg or arm or head.  (Surprisingly, he slept through this entire thing.)

Then, suddenly, I remembered that, DUH!, we always put her to sleep in her crib.  We have never put her in our bed.

It was then that I realized I might have been going kind of nuts.

I walked over to Analie’s room, stepped inside and, of course, right on the creaky spot in the floor.  I must have hit it just right, because the creaky sound was even louder than normal. Suddenly I heard a loud snuffling sound coming from her bed.

Well, the good news is that I found the baby.  The bad news is, in finding the baby I also woke her up.

I held my breath and dashed back to our room, hoping she’d go back to sleep.

Which she did.

This is the second time in the last week I have torn my room apart in the middle of the night looking for Analie.  I’m either going mental or I need to get more sleep.  Maybe it’s a combination of both, or one is leading to the other.  It’s hard to tell.  In either case, poor Joey.

First of all, I have to say that by the end of yesterday, Analie was going down fairly OK in her crib.  And when I say “fairly OK”, I mean it was taking 3 tries and 45 minutes to get her to sleep.  But she was going to sleep and that’s what matters.  Today has been a little bit hit and miss because of church this morning throwing off our mojo.

I’m not sure that it’s considered appropriate to say that going to church threw off one’s mojo.  But I digress.

The real test will be to see how well Analie does tonight.  Prior to this whole nap/independent sleep shabang, little miss gorgeous was sleeping all night long.  Last night?  Well, let’s just say this Mama’s really tired because someone small and cute and with very loud lungs woke up about three times.

Putting her down tonight is not going well AT. ALL.

Before attempting this, I wouldn’t say we were a train wreck, she just had no consistency and no good sleep.  (Which is maybe why she slept so well at night, the kid was bone tired?)  We were SO anti-schedule that we threw the baby out with the bathwater (which turns out to e a lame analogy in this case…) and jettisoned all types of routine in favor of doing whatever Analie seemed like she felt like doing.  And that was going fine until I realized that Analie is so interested in what’s going on around her that she’ll stay awake for hours, even when she’s exhausted, just so that she doesn’t miss something amazing.

So this baby does need a little bit of help from Mama to learn how to sleep and when do to it.

Waaaaahoo.

Tomorrow starts bright and early at 7am.  As much as I hate to do it, I am “scheduling” her next 5 days until can sort out a routine that works for us.  I am already beginning to think that maybe Ana doesn’t require as much sleep as the Baby Whisperer says that these munchkins need.

Analie is not the world’s greatest napper.  She’s sleeping great at night (knock on wood), even after we moved her into her crib a week ago.  I was a little worried that the change of sleeping position would throw off her baby groove, but she adapted like a champ.

Naps, however, are a whole new can of worms.  Kettle of fish. Barrel of monkeys. Bag of cats.

Why are there so many idioms about animals kept being in household containers?

But I digress.  Poor little Analie naps great some days, and then the next day she’s like HAHAHA, I won’t do it.  I WON’T!  And you can’t make me!  She just wants to be a cuddlebug, because she’ll pass out the minute you pick her up.  Today (and yesterday, and the day before, come to think of it) were nap-resistent days.

Before Analie was born, I read like a royal library full of books on parenting methods.  It was a bad idea, you see, because now I stress myself out. One method says do it this way.  BUT THE OTHER ONE SAYS YOU WILL PUT YOUR KID IN THERAPY FOR 12 YEARS IF YOU DO THAT!!!  And yet other one says, meh, give the kid a glass of milk and a jar of peanut butter and everything will be fine.

Bazinga.  I made that last one up.  It is facetious. Don’t go giving your kid milk and peanut butter and then blame it on me when you’re in the ER.

Anyway, now that she’s alive and breathing oxygen, I find that the reactions that I had to certain sleeping child methods are pretty much the same reactions I have now.  I am not comfortable with leaving her to cry in her crib for very long; I work hard all day long to develop a trusting bond.  I don’t want to destroy that by leaving her all alone in a big empty crib to scream and feel like nobody hears her.

However…I’m not going to sit on the couch and hold her all day long either.  I will go bonkers.  Indeed, there are days when I have gone bonkers.  She’s not big enough for her slings yet, I still feel like her neck isn’t supported well enough.  She’s getting SO close though, little pudger is (finally) somewhere between 9 and 10 lbs this week.  (If she’d been willing to lie still on the cookie sheet I had positioned rather haphazardly on top of my food scale, I might have gotten a more accurate reading.  But she didn’t, and so I couldn’t.)

I know she can sleep in her crib just fine, because she does it like a champ all night.  She just doesn’t want to.

And thus begins our first battle of wills.  Muahahaha.

I think I may have found my solution though.  I was scanning the blessed Internet for sleep theories, and I found one that somehow I overlooked before she was born.  Anybody heard of the Baby Whisperer?  I am going to the library ASAP to check this book out.  It’s appears to be a lovely, gentle marriage of the Attachment Parenting theory, and the Cry It Out camp.

The summary from the internets appears to be: lay sleeping baby down.  Baby cries.  Go in and comfort baby by picking baby up.  Comfort until baby stops crying.  Lay baby back down.  Repeat.

The author said in the summary I read that with one of her babies she had to repeat this 126 times the first night, 30 times the next night, then 4 the night after.

Y’all, I’m not sure Analie’s naps are not long enough for 126 repetitions of that method.  Oh my goodness.

But this may just work for me. I feel much more relaxed just reading the summary online.

She DOES nap just fine in her bouncer, I just want her to be able to consistently do it in her crib.  I’d like for her to be able to fall asleep wherever she is whenever it’s naptime.  Sleeping flexibility, as it were.

Heck, I feel like I could fall asleep wherever I am sometimes.