Kate is still struggling with her sleep a bit, but it’s gotten better. I finally started sleeping in her room on the futon, starting halfway through the night. She normally won’t sleep next to me anymore (she prefers to get up and run around instead of sleeping), but she’s been so tired and she seems to just want my touch. Once I figured that out it all got a lot better. When she nurses back to sleep if I try putting her in her crib she just wakes up and cries and cries and gets hysterical, so I stopped moving her. I leave my arm on her for a while, then when she’s more asleep I move back to my side of the bed and get comfortable. She whimpers once in a while and needs me to rub her back and nuzzle her head, she’ll settle right back down. Once she’s comfortable she seems to be fine, she’ll flop to her belly to her preferred position (which freaked me out the first time she did it, normally flipping over means she’s going to get to her feet and run off!), wiggle around, and sigh happily. She doesn’t even normally need my touch all night, just needs me nearby.

The start of the night, however, is harder. We’re still doing the DVD thing, which still involves crying for a couple minutes when I leave, but is far preferable to her screaming for an hour in the dark. Her bedtime is all kinds of messed up, often not going to sleep until midnight. To make up for this she’s taking a late afternoon/evening nap. Which does NOT make me happy, however if I keep her up and put her down at her normal time (8pm) she wakes up after 2 hours and wants to be up all night. Again, I’m not really thrilled about this new schedule, but it’s temporary and we’ll change it when she feels better. Naps I’m usually just driving her around until she falls asleep in the car and then transferring her to the crib – that’s the easiest way. Else I have to do the DVD/cry for a little bit thing. But at least she is taking decent 2+ hour naps, which she wasn’t when the molars were first coming in.

Now that we’re both getting actual sleep at night we’re both doing MUCH better during the day, though. Man we were both miserable… she was so tired she was a mess during the day, and I was pretty bitchy running on such little sleep. It’s quite nice knowing that when I crawl into her bed at 2am or whenever it is she wakes up we’ll both sleep until 9am.

I’d write more but the child is apparently not going to go to bed by herself tonight so apparently I need to go lay down with her. Sigh.