Sleep update

Melina's sleeping habits have gotten much, much better since we implemented our version of the Sleep Lady Shuffle. Now Jeff puts her to bed every night (which I like!). He reads to her and gets her calmed down, then puts her in the crib awake. He lays on the bed so she knows he's there, and usually she goes off to sleep without a cry. Lately, she has been sleeping from around 8:30 (or whenever Jeff gets her to sleep) to 6:45 or 7:00 a.m., when she wakes up for a snack and then (sometimes) goes back to sleep. She rarely wakes up at night now, though last night was an exception - she woke up several times, I think because she didn't get her regular naps in yesterday.

Last night I tried doing the Jeff routine for the first time by myself, since Jeff went out to dinner with a friend. I tried putting M. down the way I usually do (by rocking her and getting her to go to sleep on my lap) but it was taking forever and she was playing games with me, pinching me and pulling my hair and asking for the bottle and tossing down her binkie. Finally I got fed up and put her in the crib and lay down on the bed. She cried for a while (maybe three minutes), so I started singing a lullaby. She stopped abruptly and flopped down in the crib, stuck a binkie in her mouth, and lay there silently. After about 10 minutes she got up and cried again, but only for another two minutes or so. This pattern repeated several times (she was fine as long as I kept singing) and I was up there for quite a while, reading a book about a bunch of hostages, including an opera singer, being detained in a south American country. I was feeling a little like a hostage, constantly being forced to sing, but finally she fell asleep and I crept out.

Today for her second nap I tried putting her down as usual. (She usually goes down easily for her first nap). After a while I got fed up with her games and plopped her down in the crib. This time she cried for less than a minute, lay down, stared at me through the bars for a good 15 minutes (kind of unsettling) and went to sleep. I'm amazed that this worked for a nap - I never thought it would. I'll try again tomorrow.