these are the cute things ella has been saying:
– okay! let's do it! (said when a decision has been made on what our next activity will be)
– uppy-side down
– washer machiner
– holy moley (when talking about rich)
– i love daddy. (big pause) oh, and i love you too, mama.
– talk! (in which she hands out animals, dolls, what have you and you have to make them talk. all the time.)
not cute things ella has been doing:
getting up at night.
we've reached the three month mark of this night waking. she has slept through the night probably a total of two weeks the past three months. that means i've only slept a total of two weeks the last three months. here are the issues, and maybe you have a suggestion (if you have a long suggestion, please feel free to email me at lisamayterwilliger@geemail.com. you know what the "gee" is, right?):
1. on a personal level, i need at least 7 hours of sleep each night. less than that i am impatient and grumpy and ugly and that kind of mood does not help the situation. at this point i am feeling wasted and borderline depressed.
2. on some nights, ella wakes up and can be soothed back to sleep. on other nights, she wakes up screaming bloody murder and will not go back to sleep for hours. when she's having these tantrums, you cannot hold her, console her or talk to her because it make it worse. at some point she'll just stop and act like nothing ever happened. these episodes sound like "night terrors", yet she seems more coherent than is described by this definition and the crying has often gone on for two hours. it should also be noted that she does not throw any sort of typical toddler tantrums during the day.
3. i just read "the no-cry sleep solution for toddlers and preschoolers" which was all well and fine and had good advice (as well as puzzling advice like "take the teevee out of your toddler's room". really?). i think the strangest issue with her waking at night is that she takes a nap just fine and she goes to sleep at night just fine - we put her down while she awake, she falls asleep, everything is normal. lots of the advice i read on message boards do talk about toddlers waking at night but generally, people are having trouble getting their kids to sleep across the board and for us, getting her to sleep is not the problem. it's getting her to stay asleep!
4. yes, she still needs a nap (she sleeps 12:30 - 2:30 and i always have to wake her up so she doesn't sleep too long). i've tried cutting her nap from two hours to one hour and i've tried cutting the nap out altogether and on those nights she gets up even more.
5. she has been a bad sleeper from day one. she never slept like a typical newborn and didn't sleep through the night until she was 10 months old. we "sleep-trained" her when she was a 12 months old and the crying-it-out it worked for us at the time (it was relatively easy and she didn't cry that much) and from that point until she turned two, she slept through the night. i just can't see letting her cry-it-out in the middle of the night at this age because it's more screaming than crying plus it's in the middle of the freakin' night (or 3:30am like today). also, the more she screams the more it fuels her and it's harder to get her to settle down.
any thoughts (aside from a martini each night for all of us? that was nate's idea)?
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