3/19/2009

Now I Lay Me Down to Regress

Last night we hit the 14 month sleep regression. And we hit it with a vengeance. I'm not sure what moms did before the Internet, because honestly, it was only a little googling here and there this morning that explained to me that this is, apparently, normal. None of my books mention it. And I suppose if I had a network of other moms who I hung out with with any regularity they would have mentioned it. But I don't, so I had essentially no clue why my normally delightful sleeper was up and shrieking as if he might die at any moment from 10 until 4 last night (with teeny bits of dropping off here and there.) Thankfully Tim is back home, so at 2:30, when I thought that I might start pulling each and every hair out of my head one by one in an effort to 1) stay awake and 2) relieve some of my suffering I was able to do a tag-team handoff. (Part of the problem on my end is that I've gotten in the habit of taking melatonin 30 minutes before bed because it helps me sleep much better - unfortunately, it helps me sleep better. Which means that needing to stay up having taken that is considerably more difficult. So until the regression is over, I will lay off the melatonin.)

This delightful trend seems also to be working its way into naps as we just spent an hour trying to go down for the morning nap. Couple this with being fairly sure that my morning naptime is an endangered species...and, well, I'm tired just thinking about it. (They've been getting shorter, but honestly, he's tired and he'll still sleep about 90 minutes, so I don't see the point in trying to push him to just one nap. His afternoon nap is also still reasonable - so I'm waiting a bit on that transition, but as we're at a "middle of the day" nap for today, it's likely this'll be his only nap today. Which is fine...especially if it helps minimize the effect of the regression on tonight's sleeping schedule.)

I'm kind of hoping that there might a language explosion percolating in his brain as part of this sleep regression - because I'm told that usually there's a regression before the first explosion as well. It's probably too much to ask that the regressions get combined...but a girl can dream.

3 comments:

  1. I'd never heard of such a thing either. I hope you can catch up on your sleep soon! How heartbreakingly painful. The screaming/crying is the worst. And I thought the worst was behind us. Oh, no! :-)

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  2. Hugs! Mine went through some random waking up, too, though I thought it was teething. And umm...he had some allergy problems...and Benadryl helped both problems. Benadryl is the same as Baby Nyquil, swear. If it gets that bad, you might consider it. For mine, it helped to "reset his batteries," so to speak.

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  3. We are fans of Benadryl around here - when he had major snotty nose from his cold, we did that to dry him up. 2nd nap today went well and so far he's down tonight with no stirring so...fingers crossed!

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