We all have our ups and downs, and for the most part I feel that the girls are at the best age. They really are a lot of fun and I love that they just take it all in. But we are also having some definite issues.
Most nights (not all) Leah has been waking up screaming. We have no idea why. She seems to be scared by something and just screams. Of course we run in there (as this is not just whimpering and normally comes rather suddenly) and she is comforted as long as she is rocking on us. But the second we put her back in the crib she starts screaming again. Normally we have to stay there patting her until she calms down. She has to make sure we are still there a few times and then we can sneak out without her freaking out again. sometimes. I know Hannah is over there just wishing her sister would hush and let her rest!
The other night we put her down at 7:45 and she screamed until 9:30. We finally went in a rocked her. She feel back to sleep for 10 minutes. So we tried again. I waited until she was really asleep and snuck out. She screamed again in 10 minutes. Then we tried giving a bottle. She settled down again and then started up. Matt finally took her to the pack n play so Hannah could sleep and turned a movie on and let her rest. She finally fell asleep for the night at 12:30. Granted, this is not how it is every night. Sometimes she takes an incredibly long time to fall asleep and other times she wakes up suddenly.
This is all rather new, so I am hoping it is a phase. She did have her 3rd tooth pop through but I doubt it would cause all this. I guess we will see.
Which brings me to the bottle weaning. I think we are going to have 3 year olds on bottles. We have not been really consistent which I intend to work on this week. The plan was to take naptime bottles away and give a sippy cup of milk. They will not even touch cold milk, or warm milk for that matter in a cup. So I got some Ovaltine and Carnation Instant breakfast to put in the cups. That makes them drink about 3 sips more. They cry a lot longer without their bottle when going down for their naps, but for the most part they do go down. We are just bad about giving a bottle when we NEED them to sleep at a certain time so they can be awake at a certain time, and we cant handle an hour or more of crying. But I am off work this week so we are at least going to eliminate one of the 2 nap bottles.
We tried just giving them the bottle at night but not rocking them or making it dark. Just offering it before bedtime and then putting them down. Matt nixed that when we had the awful night with Leah that I talked about. Now we make it dark again and hold them for their bottle. We will work on this soon.
We may have made the mistake in giving them bottles to go to sleep but I dont think we could have survived otherwise. We are in for some big adjustments and I have to say I dont like it. My goal is to be off all bottles but the nighttime bottle by Christmas. Seems reasonable.
Anyway, I have rambled long enough. Bedtime.
3 comments:
Oh I fear I am in the same boat. We always give Wyatt a bottle before bed. I DREAD the day I have to wean him off the bottle. I just don't know how to get his to sleep without the bottle and the rocking and the darkness!! So hard!
That screaming sounds an awful lot like what AJ went through when she was that age. We finally figured that it was night terrors and in that case there really wasn't much we could do. We just tried to calm her with out picking her up.. usually patting did the trick. I know how it feels though having your child scream like she's terrified of something and not being able to do anything to stop it can be disheartening. I'm sure it will pass soon. AJ went through that for 2 months or so.
Annie
You can do it. David used to be hooked on the bottle for sleep and we got him off of it- it was so hard! Now, we are working on getting rid of the paci. I tried everything and ended up having to go the scream it out route. We did purchase a video monitor for precisely this issue. We wanted to check on him, but checking on him made things worse. It was expensive, but I think so worth it. I can look at him when he's upset and make sure he's foot isn't caught or something like that.
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