Grace and I are sitting in near darkness in the living at 2:00am. We're watching Sex and the City. I'm eating a sandwich and some ice cream. Grace is happily flipping through her books and playing with the remote control. She figures out how to turn the TV on and off.
That was last night. Who knows what tonight holds? My daughter has decided she does not want to sleep at all. She ended up going to sleep at 2:30am and getting up at 8:00am. I got up feeling as if someone had hit me in the face with a sledgehammer. Oh, and I have a head cold. It was a great day. I spent all morning hoping and praying she'd soon go for a lengthy nap. She had to, right? No, no, no...... finally at 2:30pm, she went for a classic half and hour nap.
The past week has been really difficult for me. I did not know a person could survive on so little sleep. But I'm getting by.
I came to the decision around 1:30am last night that we will begin sleep training with Grace when she's fully recovered from her ear infection. It's not something I want to do, but I feel I have no choice. She's hurting herself by fighting sleep like this, never mind what she's doing to me.
Now I will post something positive: Even when I'm dead tired, I take delight in watching Grace learn new things every day. She did two amazing things today.
In the morning, I gave her her toy piano. Instead of random pounding, she took her index finger and went from next key to next key all the way up and down the scale, very slowly, listening to each note. Future musician? 
Tonight at 9:00pm, she was very tired, but wanted to look through her books. She looked at me and made the sign for "eat." I thought, that's weird, I just fed her. Oh well, so I got up to go make her something. She turned back to the book and pointed at a picture of a monkey eating a banana. She smiled at me. Even though I was extremely tired, I was so thrilled to see her "talking" about her book. I flipped through some more books with her, making signs for different pictures (I need to learn more!) and she watched me intently do each one. 
Little incidents like that keep me going. They also make me think...maybe she's just so excited by life and all the things she's learning, that sleep is the last thing she wants to do. Poor Grace...
With that, I must get some sleep, since I'll probably be up again soon enough.
.........just thought I'd add.........she just woke up now. 30 minutes on the dot. Does someone want to rescue me???
4 comments:
Ah - Sarah - my first never slept when he was young. It gets better! Seriously. Just keep working with her on it. Hope you get some rest soon!
--Jenny
I just read a bunch of your recent posts back to back. I'm so sorry you're having such a rough time.
We have good nights and bad nights. Good nights are Rowan just waking up once to nurse, bad nights are 3 or 4 times. I'm frustrated enough with that (and trying to figure out how to get him to sleep through the night or at least have consistent good nights), I can't imagine how you're functioning on so little sleep.
Keep asking for help -- which I have a hard time with myself -- and hang in there.
Best of luck!
She is just so busy! I think it's really cool how she was playing scales on the piano!
Grace looks so busy and involved in the whole job of being awake at night! Look at these snaps!! Seems like she has a secret plan of her own in her naughty mind on how to schedule the day and night!!!
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