It’s 6:45 on a Sunday morning, and I am wide awake, showered, dressed and in make-up. Why? Who does that on a Sunday? Apparently I do, the mother of Pea, child who will not sleep in past 4:58 am. That’s right, this has more or less been going on for the two weeks since we moved her into her bed. And I’m pretty sure that our window of opportunity to move her back into her crib is long past. Yup, that ship has sailed. We gave her the first week – we assumed, albeit incorrectly, that it was about the time change and so we followed the guidelines in my favorite sleep manual. But here we are now, another week has elapsed and rather than adjusting her inner clock to wake up at a reasonable hour, she’s actually made her wake-up time earlier. By an hour. So the battle has now begun at just about 5 am. Every morning.
Pea was always a champion sleeper, from the time we sleep trained her at about one. She would turn in at 7 and wake up at 7 and we would never hear from her inbetween. And although recently we adjusted her bedtime by a half-hour so that we could get Coco down at 7, she took to the new 7:30 bedtime just fine. I think she liked the extra alone time with us. So that’s why this is coming as such a shock to me. I have tried what the books suggest, I have surfed the Internet for answers at unseemly hours of the morning and I’m pretty much finding the same information: keep putting her back in bed, without eye contact or speaking, over and over and over and over and eventually… she will get it.
Well, when the heck is “eventually?” Because it’s been two weeks now and our problem seems to be getting worse. Add into the mix: a nursing infant who doesn’t sleep through the night and a husband who is always away on business and then, just for good measure, throw in a mommy with a terrible and never-ending cold who until this morning thought she could handle this all, and you get: me. A mommy who has no patience left and is pretty sure things are never going to get better and that sleep? Oh, dear sleep? We’ll meet again in about 18 years…
I hope.
Pea, curled up on the couch, watching Dora. This would have been cute were it not for the fact that it was 5:47 in the morning and no one else on our street was awake yet.
comments
Hi Melissa:
I’m sorry this is happening. I posted the first day of your experiment and said we had a hard time with our 2 year old in a bed for over a month last year. Then, as I said, we reassembled the crib and drilled new holes so that the mattress was so low that even our very strong 2 year old could not get out. Anyway, our son seemed happy to be back in the security of his crib, and we moved him to a bed 11 months later when his new little sister needed the crib. He does great now, usually sleeping in until 6:30 or 7:00. He can also read the clock, so I tell him that I will not get out of bed until after 6:30. This also works most days.
But the point of this is to say that it’s not too late.
Anyway, good luck!
Kathy
Wow, we’re leading parallel lives! My family regularly conspires against me to keep me from getting proper sleep. In fact, I posted a blog the other day on that very topic! It reads remarkably like your own experience… hope things improve at your house. It’s a bit unpredictable at ours – one day Jr. gets up at 5:30, the next it can be 7:30… he just likes to keep me on my toes!!!
I am laughing, but only because my daughter also wakes up promptly at five am every morning. No amount of putting her back to sleep has EVER helped. What is most difficult is that you have the little one nursing, so you really aren’t getting any sleep. I’m so sorry.
Good thing Dora is such a good early morning companion.