Andrea’s Weblog

It’s been a long week. We had to have an intervention with Elizabeth.
When she was teething, she got to nurse whenever she wanted. She nursed
a lot at night and both of us would drift off to sleep. Now she’s still
waking up every hour and a half or two hours wanting to nurse. One
theory is that she’s trying to get the fattiest milk, which is produced
between 2 am and 6 am. That may be the case, but sleepy moms are not
good moms. They do terrible things like lock their babies in cars.
Earlier in the week, when I had a bad cold, I wanted to nap so badly
that when she fell asleep in the car, I pulled over into the Kroger
parking lot and tried to catch some z’s in the backseat with her.
Unfortunately, she woke up.

So we decided to have an intervention. If she cries 3 hours or fewer
after eating, she gets picked up and rocked back to sleep or I shove
the binky in her mouth. I do mean shove. She seals her mouth shut and I
literally have to pry her little lips apart. I have to try and find her
little mouth in the dark, but once it’s in she’s quiet and falls
asleep. One night she shrieked a bit and I discovered I was ramming the
binky in her eye. Oops!

So far, the intervention has been working with less than a minute of
crying each time. They usually say it takes several nights to retrain
babies, so only time will tell.

I realized how desperate for sleep I am when I found myself looking
forward to my 2 hour dentist appointment to get cavities filled. I
thought 2 hours to sit there and do nothing! Would it be possible to
sleep through the procedure? Maybe I should have asked them to knock me
out?