A Reprive and a Regression

Finally, the weather has turned pleasant for a bit, so Hubby and I have been subscribing to the throw them outside school of parenting. Both kiddos outside as much as humanly possible, burning off energy at an alarming rate, in the hopes that the boy will stop assaulting random kids and the girl will start sleeping through the night again.

And the boy has been doing extremely well, but we simply cannot keep up this level of activity - he has to go back to school next week! We are building up a bank of days when he has proved to himself that he can behave in the way we need him to, so that is something. Lets see if it continues when he's back in school.

The girl's issue has become clear - she's cutting her two upper eye teeth, and apparently that is what has been waking her in the middle of the night. And knowing that, I am much more able to deal with her waking, crying and refusing to go back to bed. Hubby, on the other hand, doesn't seem to much care why she's awake, so much as just wants her to go back to sleep so he (and I) can sleep.

She has also developed a nasty habit of waiting until the minute our heads hit the pillow to wake up and start *screaming her head off*. For an average of *90 minutes* per night.

This, of course, lead to a knock down drag out battle of wills between Hubby and I at 2 am the other night. Apparently, I was directed to go look this shit up, because "what we're doing isn't working." My main problem with that? Hubby has stopped following the bloody sleep plan!

When the boy as about 11 months old, Hubby and I were having a terrible time with him, not going to sleep easy, not staying asleep overnight, etc. And Mat leave was slowly ticking down. So I did a bunch of research and arrived at a modified Ferber method (Cry It Out with staggered soothing breaks) which we started using. Took three night, worked like a charm, and the boy still sleeps like a brick.

So around 9 months old, we implemented it with the girl. One of the main tenants is to not interact with the child when you want them to sleep - No Chatting!

And Hubby is *incapable* of not chatting with the girl in the middle of the night. No matter how many times I argue it with him, he doesn't see the harm. And this has been an ongoing argument in the background for the last year or so.

Hence, 90 minutes of screaming "daddy" in the middle of the night.

So now, in addition to violent aggressive boy, we have sleep strike girl. Nice.

Because that's *just* what we needed.

The Mommy