Exhaustion

Sorry that things have been so sporadic.  To be honest, I think that by the end of the day I am so utterly exhausted I have nothing left & simply want to melt into the couch, which has also become my new bed.

Lili has not been sleeping well. Ha. That is an understatement. Lili has slept through the night only ONE night since December 20th.  As you will recall, we separated the girls a couple weeks before this in order to give Lili some sleep because Addi was being difficult. Well, after about 2 wks of Lili sleeping like a dream from the moment her head hit the pillow and Addi continuing to be difficult, it switched.

It started out with Lili waking and crying 4-15 times a night. She would sit up in bed and cry, sometimes sobbing our names until someone would come down and tuck her back in. If you didn't answer immediately she would start wondering around. Eventually she started trying to come upstairs to our room. Shortly there after the element of terror really set in. If she wore footy jammies to bed she would strip down to her diaper and throw herself over the baby gate that we had started placing at the door to her room; sometimes landing headfirst on the hardwood floor.  We tried placing the gate at the bottom of the stairs to prevent her from coming up (as she did fall down approximately 5 stairs during the night) but she would find a way to scale it.  We tried the max dose of melatonin. We tried sleeping on the couch with her. We tried a "camp out" in Addi's room. We tried bribes, threats, spankings, talks from Nana and her doctor. We tried letting her cry it out and caved after 2.5 hours of screaming. We tried double gating her room which resulted in her becoming hysterical, throwing all her toys around her room and then building a stack high enough in her room out of bean bags, blankets and stuffed animals to try to climb over the top of the 2nd gate nearly 5 feet in the air.

It has become less hysteria unless of course the door is shut. On the nights I eventually cave and let her sleep beside me on the couch she does finally sleep the rest of the night. I am not sure how to explain how truly hard this is becoming. Every night, literally, for 53 nights now, Lili is up all night. Starts at 10-10:30 like clock work. On a good night she's up only every 1.5 hours.  On a not so good night she can be up as often as EVERY 15-20 minutes. Sometimes you can yell to her from the couch to go back to bed and she'll lay back down and fall asleep for another 30 min. Othernights she's nearly impossible to coax back to sleep and then when you finally do she's up again in another 30 min.

Her doctor thinks it's behavioral and that despite her fears we need to just shut her door when she gets out of bed and just leave it closed for the rest of the night. This is the one thing we have not tried. I don't have the heart. She seems to become terrified, not just angry, when the door is shut and I don't want to create a fear of bedtime. She GOES to bed well. Also, I think this is more than just a behavior. I feel like there are some more organic sleep cycle issues behind this.  I mean, think about how tired you get sometimes. If you are like me, when you are exhausted you can sleep through fire alarms. So why has Lili, who is obviously tired herself, not gotten to the point that even once a week she has one of those nights where she is soooo tired that she just sleeps through the night because she's too tired to "play the game"?

She has slept one night. One night at Nana's house last month she slept through the night. I suggested letting Lili move into Nana's house, but for some reason that solution didn't take.

We are scheduled to meet with a psychologist in early March that specializes in sleep issues in children. I'm not holding much hope for it getting resolved anytime soon... I miss my bed. I miss my husband. I miss my concentration & sanity.

The irony, Addi sleeps wonderfully. Go figure. So if I seem short or am not keeping up on this lovely blog, please forgive me.