New problems

We had been pretty lucky with regards to Noelle's sleep in recent months. Ever since around her 3rd month, she's been conking out around 8pm or so and sleeping till pretty much 5:30 or 6:oo the next morning. Sure she woke up a bit sometimes at night but she would just go back to sleep. Even more of a miracle, she pretty much fell asleep by herself. (Yay, the sleep books had been right! The stuff we did/had to do during the first 3 months to get her to sleep like pacifier use/swaddling/making shushing noises didn't set up bad habits!)

However, the past few days, she has been waking up at 4:30 and definitely NOT going back to sleep. The problem started with what I KNEW was going to cause trouble. As I've previously mentioned, she tends to fall asleep for a nap at 6PM every day. I initially wanted to keep her up since a nap so close to her bedtime made me nervous that she wouldn't sleep through the night but up until recently, she would wake up from this "nap" after half an hour or hour or so and still go to bed fine for her actual bedtime and sleep through the night as usual. Once in a while she'd stay asleep from the 6:00pm nap and just wake up normal time in the morning. I'd chalk that up to her being extra tired...maybe she didn't nap as well during daycare that day?

Starting Tuesday night however, she was waking up earlier (she'd be wide awake by the time I woke up for my alarm at 5:30 whereas before she'd generally be either asleep still or just starting to stir). Then starting Thursday night, I would be woken up by her crying at 4:30. The last 2 nights I waited to see if she'd go back to sleep. Nope. Just steadily increasing crying. So I got her and fed and changed her. She then fell back to sleep. Grrrrr...great for you but too late for Mommy to fall back asleep before her own alarm. To try to prevent this early waking, since Thursday we have not let her sleep her 6pm nap or woken her up from it after 20 minutes or so. She went to bed last night after 8pm and she STILL woke up at 4:30 this morning. I left her alone for 10 minutes and fervently prayed she'd fall asleep again but no. She just started crying harder.

Generally, everytime she cries, I go through a panicked inventory of what can be wrong. Maybe her diaper rash is bothering her? (More on that later). Does she have a fever? Is she starving? As soon as I picked her up though, she stopped crying so I knew it was only her wanting to be picked up. So even though it broke my heart to let her cry, I put her back in the crib while I patted her back and made calming shushing sounds while keeping the room dark, in the hopes that she would learn to go back to sleep. I figured that since she fell asleep so soon again the previous mornings after I fed and changed her, she is still needing sleep.

She cried in such a heartbreaking way for 20 minutes. I actually started crying a bit cuz I felt so bad but she needs to learn to sleep until at least the sun is up! She finally quieted down when I started singing that "Good morning" song I always sang to her ever since she was a newborn. 99% of the time, it calms her down. (I know, I know- the irony of singing "Good morning" when I'm trying to get her to sleep. Myeh. She doesn't know what I'm saying). She calmed down and FELL ASLEEP after 10 minutes of soft singing. Of course, it was 5 minutes to my alarm going off by then. So here I am, writing about it. Boohoo...I need to go to bed even earlier now to deal with this.

On to the diaper rash problem:
Noelle doesn't usually get diaper rash. However, she pooped non stop all day since roughly Friday night. I guess the constant pooping is irritating cuz now her "down there" is all red. We can't figure out why she's pooping so much. I can't even say if it's diarrhea or constipation. You might ask how the hell can I not tell the difference. Well, her poop looks dry (hence constipated looking) but she's going so much (isn't that diarrhea?). Semantics aside, she's doing something unsavory in her diaper very frequently. I stopped her rice cereal for now (again) to see if that will help. I figure, myeh, she doesn't like it so much recently anyway. (Her latest thing is to do raspberries with her mouth while I feed her cereal. You can imagine how much "fun" that is). I really hope the pooping isn't cuz of something I ate. That's always maddening to me- not knowing what the heck is causing her weird poops. Is it something I ate? The new facial cleanser I'm using getting into her milk? The rice cereal? The universe out to get me? =P

Huh...it's now 1/2 an hour past when she fell asleep and she's still asleep. We're getting ready to go to Rob's mom's today so we were planning on doing the same morning routine as if it's a workday so that we can get out of the house early. Hmmmm...I think I will just let her sleep in. I'm not messing with this hard-won sleep.