Sleep deprivation

Everyone tells you to sleep before the baby comes... and to be honest, I did!   I love sleeping and since I had two months of preg-cation, as Shane called it, I took full advantage of my opportunity to sleep as much as humanly possible.  I knew I was in trouble when I was celebrating four hour stretches of sleep during Xinyi's first few months of life.  Four hours!  Then five, six, seven, once she even gave me eleven :X.  I now feel comfortable divulging that shameful secret (that I was too afraid to tell other new parents for fear of them silently hating me) because it's gone.  My sleeping angel has returned to my non sleeping angel.

I read an article that said new parents should celebrate the four month sleep regression because it demonstrates your baby is maturing and developing on track. Basically at four months, babies mature from infant sleep patterns into adult like sleep patterns.  This means babies who were sleeping through the night begin waking three, four, five times a night because they don't know what to do with these new sleep patterns.  They wake up and don't know how to fall back asleep unless you teach them how to.  And thus you become a human sleep inducer.  That is where I am now.

Last night I was up with Xinyi from 2am to 6am.  Every time I laid her down to sleep, she'd open her pretty eyes and coo at me.  Cute at 9am, awful at 2-6am.  She'd sleep for 30 min and wake up or wake up as soon as she touched the crib.  I tried almost every trick in my limited new parent trick book.  Eventually she went down and stayed down but oh man, what a struggle.  This hasn't happened since she was 2 months old.  When she was two months old, it was taking me an average of three hours to get Xinyi to sleep.  One night she hadn't slept and was refusing to sleep so I strapped her to me in the baby k'tan and walked her to sleep.  I sat upright in a chair for several hours so she could sleep because she was so tired.  That was my last trick in the bag, and I'm so glad I didn't have to use it.

Sleeping babies are adorable. Some babies are great sleepers, others are taught by their parents to be great sleepers. I'm in the process of preparing to sleep train Xinyi and how I wish I could turn back time and start when she was just a babe.  Hindsight :)

I don't know if any of this makes sense... I'm not sure of much right now, but that's okay.   As much as I love sleep, I love my baby girl more.  Someday I'll be trying to drag her buttt out of bed and these days will be a blur.  Or so I try to tell myself at six in the morning when running on 2.5 hours of sleep.

Right now, my little sweetie is passed out in my arms.  And I love it.   I know, I know, I need to and will sleep train her.  But today, she is my baby who needs to catch up on some sleep and so her mommy will hold her.

What I wished she looked like yesterday. ..