Cruel and Unusual

Yes, I'm a broken record.

Yes, this is again about napping and early waking.

Isn't it amazing how this parenting gig continually kicks you in the ass?

I don't know about you, but I have found teething and its associated uncertainties to be one of the most challenging aspects of parenthood.

As I've whined about before, our Girly slowly evolved into a very poor napper (at home) and just kept waking up earlier and earlier. We kind of fixed the early waking about 5 weeks ago, then dontcha know that Girly went and got sick, sick, sick and it messed everything up. (Frankly, I worried about the sickness, but she slept wonderfully. Ahhh, the conundrums of mommy-ing).

It doesn't help that she must have the slowest-erupting-teeth in all of teeth history. I swear that she has been working on 2 upper and 2 lower molars for about 2 months now. The right ones are now fully erupted while the left ones are now just peeking through. And the gums by her canines are just swelling up, in typical annoying teeth fashion.

I have no issue with crying it out when I can feel reasonably certain that Girly has a full belly and is not in pain. That is where teething has been so hard for me: I can give her Motrin at bedtime, but she wakes 8 or 9 hours later and I don't know if it is habit or pain or both. I felt I should err on the side of caution and give her more Motrin, which worked sometimes but not all the time.

FRUSTRATION!

We finally just decided that it must be habit. Or mostly habit. Or mostly ANNOYING.

On Friday I decided to really push her on her nap to try to get her to finally sleep longer at home. She slept about 30 minutes, cried for 8, slept for 15 minutes, cried for 10, then slept about 45 more minutes. Bliss! Girly was going to be home with me for 6 full days with the holiday weekend, so I decided to push the rest of it, too. I think she cried a little bit early Saturday morning, but for the most part has slept until at least 6:20am every day since. Which is, obviously, amazing. The better part, though, is that her naps have been consistently 1 1/2 hours - 2 hours or a little more ever since. This is revolutionary since we were only getting about 45 minutes.

Again, like I said, broken record. These themes just repeat themselves over and over and over again. (At least in our household). Please slap me next time I whine about our poor sleeper. I'll blame my poor memory on the lack of sleep.