Is She Sleeping Through The Night?

If you're the parent of a relatively new infant you get this question a lot. The second you bring them home from the hospital the phone starts rining... "So is she sleeping through the night yet?" The people posing the question are almost always parents themselves, usually with kids who are well beyond the needing to be fed through the night phase. They ask, not because they care, but rather so they can quietly snicker to themselves and be grateful that it's happening to you and not them.

So to all of you who have been asking I am happy to report that Maya has been sleeping through the night for about 4 weeks now. That's the short answer.

The long answer is.... she has her last bottle of the evening somewhere around the 9 pm mark. With any luck she's down for the count by 10. From the moment she's sleeps like an angel. At least that's what she did the first three weeks. For the last week at precisely 3:30 am (you can set your watch by it) she will "wake up" crying. Now she's not actually awake, but roused enough that she will cry and roll around in her bed while trying to,literally,eat the fingers off her hands. Every night I stumble across the hall and extract her fingers from her mouth and replace it with her sucky. The crying instantly ceases. The legs however shoot straight up in the air so they're at 90 degrees to her body. She then begins to roll from side to side. The second she touches the mattress with the left side of her body she's rolling back over on the right. The whole time her legs remain at a 90 degree angle. It looks like she's trying to do an exercise routine from an ancient Jane Fonda workout video. Now sometimes the sucky in the mouth trick will work and she'll fall back asleep and not be heard from until 6 am-ish. Many nights, however, the sucky trick can only buy me a few minutes. The problem is all the crying and exercising going on in Maya's room has been waking up Abby. Which wouldn't be a huge deal if Abby didn't want to get in bed and sleep with us. We only have a queen sized bed and I gotta tell you people there's not a lot of available real estate left. To make matters worse Abby refuses to sleep in between her Dad and I because she's afraid her father will fart on her and it's a valid concern. Saturday night after my eleventy hundred trip across the hall I had just slipped back under the covers only to have Maya instantly start crying while at the same time Abby was lifting up the blankets to climb in beside me. In a moment of pure sleep deprived Mommy weakness I laid my head back and cried. Michael, like all husbands, is programmed to know when I've reached the end of my rope. He was up and had Maya down stairs before I could blink. Leaving me and Abby to go back to sleep discuss why she loves playing with Victoria until the sun came up.