Thursday, April 09, 2009

Sleep? Me? HAHAHHHAHAHAHHAHA!

I'm so tired that it's hard to think. I'm writing here in hopes that writing something - even a blog post - will get the juices flowing for my essay exam.

I had to give co-sleeping one more shot. Terry was exhausted, so I spent two nights in the mattress in Valerie's room with her. It... really didn't go well. After talking with my sister, I was wondering if the memory foam mattress was the problem, the reason why it was hard for me to sleep while side-lying nursing at night. Well, that question has been answered conclusively - it's not the mattress. In fact, my previous hunch was confirmed - she and I just keep waking each other up. I had a single 4-hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep each night; the rest was waking just about every half hour.

So last night we turned to the "big guns" - the Dreaded CIO, or "cry-it-out." We had agreed on a protocol - go to the door and reassure her with our voices and ever-increasing intervals, starting at one minute. (Last night we did 1-3-5-5-5-10- and then she fell asleep.) It went better than I expected - she fell asleep in half an hour, and didn't wake up again until midnight (4.5 hours later). That time she went to sleep in 15 minutes. At 2:30 she stirred and said "waa" for less than a minute, then was asleep again - we didn't have to do anything. But from 4:30-5:30 she was awake and not happy about it. She did these little intermittent complaint-cries, while kneeling in her crib with her head leaning against the slats, almost asleep. After an hour I went in and nursed her for 30 minutes - she was out again, for another hour, then Terry held her for the last hour of sleep that she needed. She woke up happy and was her normal self all day today.

We had been planning for me to go in and wake-to-sleep nurse her (see earlier post) at 8 hours but she woke up before I had a chance to do that. Tonight we'll do it at 7.5 hours. I really do think she gets hungry at that point in time because she always wakes up then.

We're also going to do a gentle wake-to-sleep without nursing just before the 4-hour mark because she nearly always wakes up at that point too.

It's just that the timing is terrible. I'm supposed to be writing this essay exam, as mentioned previously. But we had to try everything else before doing CIO.

And I've fallen off the wagon. The coffee wagon, that is. After more than four years, I've re-caffienated my life (well, I did drink green and black tea in the meantime, and decaf).

Somehow, it will all get done. We'll survive. I'm fairly sure of it.

3 comments:

Rachel said...

Everytime I give up caffeine it makes it back into made it back into my life pretty quickly. I think a month is the longest I have gone.

I hope you and V can have a little heart to heart about sleeping at night so you can feel human again. Eventually she will understand how important sleep is.

Anita said...

Sorry I was wrong about the memory-foam mattress. All I have to go on is that I'm less comfortable with Lotus than I was with Solana. Now I have some minor back pain and I often wake up with a tingly hand (from "falling asleep"). I guess it's something else and not the mattress... Coffee's not the worst thing you could be doing! Sounds like you need it right about now. Hope it helps! Love you!

E. Phantzi said...

P, it was worth a shot! I had to find out!