Frustrations

For the past two weeks Penny has been waking up at night and it is sooo frustrating. I don't mean she wakes up once looking for a feeding or something. I mean she wakes up and stays up all night. You can comfort her by holding her and walking her around, but if you so much as flinch like you want to put her down she starts to cry. And, lest you think I haven't considered just taking her to bed with us, I have tried. She cries then too. She's not running a fever and she doesn't pull on her ears, so I'm fairly certain it's not an ear infection. On the other hand, she's not eating that great either. I can't judge exact amounts, but it seems like she's not nursing as long as she used to - and she just shows almost no interest in the solid foods, although she hasn't been very interested in them from the beginning.

Last night went marginally better than the past few. She slept from 830 until 3. Then I walked her around and got her back down in her bed at 320 (which was different from other nights - the night before I never would have gotten her to stay asleep when I put her back down), but then she woke up at 5 and wouldn't go back to sleep. I ended up having to feed her at 6 instead of 630 like normal, but that was only 30 minutes off so not so bad.

Anyway, as I say, it is very frustrating. I called the pediatrician's office on Friday and was told to give her tylenol before bed (on the theory that it's teething) - which I was doing already anyway. And then the nurse told me to let her cry some before going to get her. Well, no duh on that one too. Of course I let her cry to make sure she's serious before I drag myself out of bed at 3 am. She used to be a champ at putting herself back to sleep, but now not so much. In fact just three nights ago I watched her put herself to sleep, so I know she knows how to do it. Well, of course she does - she's woken up at 4 am her whole life, but has always (since she started sleeping through the night at 8 weeks) gone back to sleep on her own. Prior to the last two weeks, she'd woken up during the night enough that I had to comfort her exactly 4 times and 3 of those were when we were staying at somebody else's house.

The only thing I can think is that it might be early separation anxiety? And the only thing I know to do is just keep comforting her. But, something's got to give. I had to miss work on Friday because I'd only fallen asleep at 6 am and there was no way I could get there at 8. And we missed going to Tray's parent's house the last two weekends for Tray's dad's birthday which was last week because we knew it would only be worse up there (see the last sentence of the above paragraph). And, I was making tremendous progress on my dissertation in the evenings, but now I go to bed super early to insure that I get at least a few hours of sleep before she wakes up again. So, so frustrating.

Well, thank you guys for letting me vent. Just to keep it in perspective, here's a picture from this afternoon. She was sitting there spellbound as Tray played guitar for her, but of course when I pulled the camera out she looked at me instead. She's such a sweetheart.