gaaah

[flea]

To soften you up before the rant: I painted my toenails red today, and then I painted Casper's red too, because she wanted me to. They are So. Cute.

The Rant: We seem to have the options of half-hour nursing sessions 1-2 times a night, or 30-60 minute crying sessions, with multiple brief visits every 10-15 minutes to say "it's time to sleep," and the phrase, "I. Want. Mom. Mee." whined, cried, shrieked, etc. approximately 147,000 times. I am so ANGRY about this right now. I spend an hour awake listening to her cry, then an hour awake surfing to cool down my anger so I can actually sleep, then I get up in the morning and resent her all day Like a cat who goes straight to the one person in the room who hates or is allergic to cats, Casper chooses these days to be particularly clingy wth me.

I'm thinking we need to try something completely new, but I'm not sure what it is. Have her sleep on a pillow on the floor in our bedroom? Give her to the wolverines?

Comments

Re: Tough Approach

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Kids are different, which is why I didn't say "DO this for X minutes."

Yeah, I wasn't meaning for that to come across so much as a critque of your advice as a general rant of frustration with the whole topic. My 3 year-old, "Chuckles", is the first baby in either side of our extended family for like, decades, and she's got the high-strung temperment of some of my siblings with the insomnia of my husband's family. So all we've got to work with are two grandmas who say, "Well, *you* never did that..." and a bunch of books that say "All kids do X" -- and ours invariably doesn't!

So for casperflea, here's our latest bizarre sleep anecdote: the brand new magic bullet of sleep for Chuckles is... a magnetic erase board. You know, those things like an Etchasketch, but you draw on them with a stylus? Someone got her a little travel one for her birthday, and it has knocked her out at least eight times in the past two weeks. I seriously doubt this will ever be useful advice for anyone else, but for her, her biggest problem has *always* been winding down enough to fall asleep, and for whatever reason, drawing circles on that darn board is more soporific than anything since the baby swing.