When Virginia was a newborn she slept a lot. When she was tired she fell asleep pretty easily, sometimes with a little help from nursing. Somehow she got bigger and started sleeping less and started having more trouble falling asleep.
Recently she has started shrieking when she is unhappy but not quite crying-stage unhappy. It is a truly awful sound that turns my stomach inside out and requires all my mothering skills to endure. This prehistoric sound emerges when I've nursed her, I've changed her, I've played with her and she still seems to need something else. She is rubbing her eyes and looking at me like, "why can't you fix it?"
I can't fix it because she is so distractible. Unless she is really drowsy, like she is at night time, I can't seem to nurse her to sleep or rock her to sleep. She keeps looking around at what else is going on.
She devolved into sleepy dinosaur baby pretty quickly this morning and I thought I should probably try to get her to take a real nap to save my sanity. I put her on the bed in my office and lay down next to her. I turned out the lights and closed the blinds. I put her music on the lap top and turned on the fan (a possible distraction, but it is monotonous and possibly drowsy-making). It took about half an hour and more screeching (no crying), but finally she fell asleep.
And she's been asleep for almost an hour.
I could say, "I will do it this way from now on." But giving myself these types of rules can be crazy-making. Instead I will view this as another strategy I can employ. We'll take it day by day and do whatever works at the time.
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