Sleep Part… I Don’t Even Know Anymore, Man

Is anyone sick of hearing about my sleep struggles yet?

Oh wait, I DON’T GIVE A SHIT! I’m going to keep talking about them anyway!

I think where I last left this is that I was forcing Edith to fall asleep in her own bed whether she liked it or not, but I was still sitting next to her and rubbing her back, putting her pacifier back in when she hurled it across the room in fury, etc. So not really sleep training exactly, but not rocking her to sleep in my arms anymore.

This…kind of works. Some nights she wails for an hour, other nights she goes right to sleep, but either way, she stays asleep from then on, and has stopped doing this thing where she wakes back up three or four times needing to be rocked again before she is fully down for the night.

However, when she wakes up for her middle of the night feeding, it is absolute torture trying to get her back to sleep. One night, we spent two hours at it. So I was really thrilled when she started sleeping through! She now pretty consistently sleeps through the night, which would be perfect, except…

She is waking up for the morning 20 minutes earlier every day. The first time she did this, she woke up at 6:00 a.m. which is earlier than I preferred (we had been getting up at 7:00), but not out of bounds, so we just got up.

The next morning, she got up at 5:30 a.m. which was too early to get up, but too late to feed her and put her back down, so I just popped her into bed with me and dozed while she played with my face. I suspected this might be a mistake.

The next morning, she got up at 5:00 a.m. Again, I put her in bed with me, and managed to semi-nap for another hour.

Then, this morning, she woke up at 4:40 a.m.

This removed any doubt I was clinging to as to where this is going. Having been firmly uninvited from bedsharing at one end of the night, she is now working at it from the other end. It’s brilliant, don’t get me wrong! And I respect her game!

But what am I going to do now? And perhaps more importantly, how does a stupid infant keep checkmating me like this?