Sleep, revisited

On other fronts, after eight months or so of really excellent sleeping habits, Sofie's started to go through what various internet folks refer to as the "hellaciously bad sleep regression" that happens around 18-19 months. She's napping fine, but bedtime has become hell.

Now our kid who formerly had the easiest and shortest bedtime routine EVER just cannot get to sleep; she screams and seems really frantic and scared when we put her in her crib and needs to be held and coddled for a lot longer before she'll finally lay down. This process can take up to two hours, depending on how upset she is. And believe me, nothing is more exhausting at the end of a long day than struggling for two hours to get your screaming, frightened toddler to bed.

We're trying to slowly ease back into sleep training, but she's just SO frantically upset that we can't quite bring ourselves to do it yet. So we hold her, or pat her back, or sit in the chair, or at a minimum just shush her from the doorway, and she tries repeatedly to go to sleep, with fits of crying in between. The good news is that it's taking a little bit less time every night. Tonight was only an hour. This may sound like a lot but not compared to yesterday night.

Once she's down, it's anyone's guess what will happen after that -- some nights she still sleeps through, and some nights she wakes up shrieking with terror two or three times and needs our help. Gloworm, it appears, is no longer up to the task of fighting off her nighttime fears by himself.

Way to fall down on the job, glow-bug. Thanks a bunch!

We're not used to this wake up schedule anymore. It sucks rocks. I drank an entire pot of coffee this morning, by myself. We're groggy and tense, and bedtime is a subject of not small amounts of dread. I'm trying to up her physical activity, make sure she gets a lot of fresh air, and otherwise wear her out during the afternoon, but I'm not sure it's helping yet.

Tonight I left just as the whole routine was starting to go to my Yoga Momma class, and I felt guilty about how intensely relieved (and almost elated) I was to not have to do bedtime tonight. It was truly refreshing to miss the whole thing just for one night.

On the plus side, I take comfort in two things:

• Every kid her age that we know is going through some version of this right now -- the ones that are sleeping ok aren't napping, and vice versa. Several are having the screaming/scared issues Sofie is, and the ones that aren't want to get up and play for two or three hours in the middle of the night. So it's got to be just a developmental phase. A quick google search backs that concept up.
  
• I'm sure it will pass. Moxie, parenting advice goddess, posits that this happens around 18-19 months and passes around 20 months and it really doesn't matter what you do. So whether we're hard core about sleep training or take a softer line and cuddle her when she's scared, it'll pass.
  
  And in the long run, Sofie likes her sleep. I trust that she'll be back to normal soon enough.