Oh So Tired ...

For the first month or so, my husband and I took turns getting up for the middle-of-the-night feedings. When the alarm would go off, one of us would hit the snooze once or twice, then stumble out of bed and into the kitchen to prepare her bottle, then go get her to get some food in her. These feedings took at least an hour, most of it spent trying to get her to wake up.

Those days are behind us now, but we still don't get much shut-eye. Three or four times a night, our daughter screams. Nothing will get a parent out of bed faster. Thankfully, it's never a big deal. It's always because she's mad as heck, not because of fear or injury. What prompts an angry scream from our 7 month old? A pacifier that's out of reach and those darn sides of the crib that dare keep her from rolling left some more when she really, really, really wants to roll to her left.

Her doctor said we may be conditioning her not to solve her own middle-of-the-night problems. Maybe. I can't say I can argue with that. But, by that point, we're up anyway. Our child did just scream, after all. We might as well help her out by finding her pacifier (which sometimes has bounced right out of the crib, and in those instances, she can't solve that problem), and help ourselves out, because as long as she's not happy, none of us will get any more sleep.