She cried, and then ate, and then cried some more. Then had another little snack... And then cried and then fussed, and then cried... (get the idea?) She was a fussy monster and was NOT happy no matter what position, where I held her, how I "susshhhhed" or what I tried. I even gave her a Gripe Water bottle at like 10:15pm or something that didn't help. I didn't want to feed her any more after that because surely she was going to explode and barf up all that good food I had stuffed in her in an effort to quiet the monster.
Finally I moved her back to my bedroom around 10:30 and I was at my wits end. Not to mention a little tired. So I went to my last resort: Put her in her room and let her just cry. Watch the clock, let her cry for 10 minutes and then go in and comfort her. In the past (2 times this has happened before) she exhausts herself and when I go and get her and comfort her, she finally falls asleep out of pure exhaustion.
So I put her in her swing in her room, turned on the white noise machine, closed her door, closed my door and went in my room. 10:52pm. Check. She can cry until 11:02pm when I go and get her. I turned on the video monitor (do you know the new ones have ZOOM? So cool...) and turned off the sound on it and picked up the phone to call my mother. I needed a little reassurance of "you're not a horrible parent for leaving your child in another room crying for 10 minutes after 2 1/2 hours of nonsense..." I chatted with my mom who assured me I wasn't a horrible parent and after a few minutes I turned on the sound to check on her and she wasn't crying anymore. After about 5 minutes she put herself to sleep. Glorious! I immediately hung up the phone and layed down to try and get a few minutes of desperately needed sleep under the impression that she would be back up in a couple hours to repeat the entire process.
Imagine my surprise when I was dreaming that I was sleeping on rocks and I awoke to look at the clock and realize that, holy crap, it was 4:15am. And no, I didn't happen to be sleeping on rocks, those rocks were my boobs that were screaming out because they hadn't been drained in almost 6 HOURS!!!
I checked the monitor and realized she was breathing and then decided to come out and pump one boob and let her eat off the other one when she got up (which would surely be any moment). So there I was at 4:20am, pumping one boob while reading all of your blogs. I pumped 5 ounces out of that one boob (the left one is an overachiever...) and then went back to my bed. I went back and forth between trying to go back to sleep and let her wake up on her own whenever she wanted, to waking her up to eat. My rationale being that if I woke her up to eat then, A) I was already awake and ready to feed, and B) I could (hopefully) feed her and get her back down and give myself another solid hour of sleep before The Boy got up for the day. But you know that old saying of never waking a sleeping baby? Well I decided to just go in and check on her, so I did and I touched her little hand while doing it and that was enough to stir her and make her realize that she hadn't been fed in HOURS!
So she ate for a good twenty minutes and was back in her bassinet by 5:30am. The Boy got up at 6:20am and I hung with him until 6:40am when I put on a movie for him and climbed back in bed. I slept again until 8:00am when The Girl wanted to eat again.
Minus the whole screaming for hours thing, I would call that a DAMN successful night. Love it!
No comments:
Post a Comment