Adventures in newborn sleep...

... well, "adventures" could actually translate quite well to "tears" for all involved (except Jordan, I suppose).  I'm not good with the whole sleep deprivation thing.  Sometimes I just cry, and then I feel like a horrible mother.  Why am I crying?  I'm such a wimp.

Anyway, Lucy keeps me guessing.  There's actually some really good things happening with her sleep.  1- She's got her days and nights going right, and her bedtime has moved up to between 5:30-6, which is where it's supposed to be (at least according to Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child, my favorite sleep book).  When she goes down at night, she sleeps all night (meaning when she eats, she doesn't expect to play, she just goes back to sleep).  She did this all naturally, and I'm very grateful.  2- We have gotten into a great routine of Eat, Play, Sleep.  She doesn't want to be nursed to sleep, which is both a blessing and a curse (more on this later).  Her awake times are about 1 hour, and then she naps for 45 min-2 hours and then she eats.  It's a good schedule.  Sometimes I can even get her to go to sleep on her own when I put her down drowsy.  Maybe about 25% of the time.  Not bad.

Now, for the bad.  She sleeps for 8 hours at night.  Yay!  Those hours are 6pm-2am.  BOO.  I have tried to move it.  Feed her when I go to sleep, etc.  No luck.  She feels the need to wake up and eat between 2-4, no matter what I do.  It's so lame.  I think I just have to wait for her to out-grow it.

If she's awake for much longer than an hour, she becomes extremely overtired and is incredibly difficult to put to sleep.  She just gets herself so worked up nothing can calm her down.  While I love I don't have an eat-sleep association, it would be so helpful if she would eat and calm down when she was so worked up and exhausted.  Alas, she refuses to nurse when she's really angry.  This is a total turn around from Clara, who LOVED nursing.  Feeding her could solve any problem, and I loved how I always had the ability to calm her down.  With Lucy, I feel so powerless sometimes.  When she got her vaccinations, I was already to take her and feed her and get her soothed before we left.  She would.not.latch.  It was upsetting for me, I felt like I had failed her as her mother.  :(

The biggest issue is that Lucy is so routine bound that when we mess it up, she won't sleep.  She struggles to sleep in car seats, and I have tried every carrier and she kinda hates all of them.  Church is bad, but the evening after church is an absolute nightmare.  She doesn't sleep at church (remember how she won't sleep in car seats?), so when it comes time to go to bed she's so overtired that it's nearly impossible to get her to stay asleep.  This has caused me to be quite home bound.  It's just not worth it to leave in almost all cases.  I'm looking forward to the day I can leave the house and know I won't pay for it later...

Anyway, that was a whole bunch of whining on my part, I know.  I remind myself it does get better, and eventually she will sleep.  Frankly, with some of the good habits she has so far, she should sleep through the night sooner than Clara did (11 months).  Until then, I'll dream of 5 hours of consecutive sleep...