In the Woods

So it has almost been two months since we did the whole Sleep Shuffle thing with Raegan. I have to say, in two months, we've come a long way in improving our quality of sleep and quality of life. That being said, I'm beginning to wonder if my house/family is just always going to be running a little bit on Tired....

The Shuffle itself took about two weeks. After that, Raegan was an absolute Rock Star putting herself to bed at night AND at nap time as well. ROCK STAR. We still had night wakenings there for a while, but those rapidly diminished in frequency and intensity, which was great.

Now Raegan did lose some weight during that time which kind of freaked out one of our local lactation consultants, but really, it makes sense. 1) I wasn't nursing every 2-3 hours all night, every night (which, I refuse to feel bad about considering RL was a 10-mo-old at the time, not a newborn!) 2) She moves All. The. Time. It was remarkable that she gained any weight this summer; losing a little bit hasn't seemed to bothered her at all. We've since stepped up the solids and she appears to be just fine.

The real problem, after sleep training RL to put herself to sleep (and back to sleep during the night) was that she started waking up really freaking early every morning. Like 5:00 a.m. early. And did I mention she was screaming as soon as she awoke? All the books say not to get the kiddo up before 6:00 at the very earliest, so there were some mornings we endured a lot of unhappy baby before "officially" starting our day. Not fun. Harrison would often get up during this time, too, so once again we all started walking around a bit like zombies. We tried putting her down later but no dice. She would still wake early and pissed, and then she was running on even less sleep the next day because of the later bed time which made her day sleep harder to figure out as well. And so on and so on for a few weeks. Not a fun cycle.

Then, a couple weeks ago, Raegen started stretching closer to rising at 6:00. Brilliant! We were loving it. A couple days she even made it to our magic goal time of 6:30. Even more Brilliant! Even more loving it!

Around this same time, though, Harrison decided to revisit his old Jack-in-the-box habits from shortly after Baby Sis was born and started coming in our room at all hours of the night. As in, we are now back to the two, sometimes three, visits from him on a lot of nights. Sometime Ben can just walk him back and be done with it. Other times HD wants to go to the bathroom (Side Note: for the life of him, he will not pee in his diaper at night. I know this is a good thing. I know this is the ultimate goal of potty training. But for the Love of Pete, please just stay asleep in your bed and pee in your diaper so I can stay asleep, too!). And then on the other-other times, he wants to get really upset and have a mid-night-melt-down for reasons we really can't determine.

Ugh. Once again, I am SO tired. Whereas Ben can often just fall back to sleep after any and all of these little incidents, I often get woken up completely and have to do all of the (for me, rather hard) work of falling back asleep. So at best I'm back to getting two-to-three-to-sometimes-four hours of sleep in a row. Mama needs MORE!

To top of the sleep mayhem, Raegan has quit being a happy-go-to-sleep-er. Just in the last week she has decided that she needs to be mad Mad MAD before bed, especially, and often before nap as well. I have no idea why this changed. Before she was honestly going down often without a peep. Sometimes the "peeps" now last as long as 25 or 30 minutes which is longer than when we first started sleep training.

Again, Ugh.

I apologize. I don't mean to complain and really I'm not trying to do that here. I wanted to update those of you who have been with us through our sleep struggles and let you know that while we've made progress, we're not out of the woods yet. Something tells me one never leaves the woods - they just keep changing. But isn't that parenthood in general? Just when you think you've got something figured out, the kid changes and it is once again, Day One.