Commiserating with other sleep trainers

After seeing a few other blog posts on baby sleep (or lack thereof), I decided it was time to add my two cents.

This little angel has given me a run for my money lately.

I know, I know.  Way too adorable to cause any trouble.

We are blessed.  Exceedingly so.  She is so healthy, so energetic, so full of LIFE and JOY every second of every minute of every hour of every day...

But there's the rub.  The girl can't calm down enough to take a decent nap.  We've been fighting the nap thing for as long as I can remember.  Things got better for a month or so, but this week it's all gone downhill again.  I'm doing everything exactly the same, but suddenly she's skipping naps altogether, or taking up to an hour to stop talking, squealing, and eventually crying to settle in and fall asleep for a nice, restorative, 30 minute nap (ha).  Naps haven't ever been very long, but never before has she had a hard time falling asleep for them (always put her down awake and fell asleep easily on her own) so that's discouraging.  I used to swaddle her baby-straight-jacket style to help calm her down and stay contained, but that had to go once she started rolling like a crazy woman.  I'm exhausted from all the effort, and also anxious about how unhealthy the lack of sleep is for her, and absolutely hate to see her in an overtired state.

Today I was so fed up after her second "nap" and had to get out of the house.  It was so, so good for all of us (highly recommend it), though somebody is clearly not her normal happy self:

Night sleep is both worse and better.  As mentioned above, poor girl has become a proficient roller and can go both directions with ease.  However, for some reason, when she's in her crib and rolls back-to-front, she suddenly CANNOT roll back on her own.  It totally infuriates her, but helping her roll back doesn't help much because then she sees us and we start the self-soothing process all over again.  We're believers in the Weissbluth method (Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child), so she's back to going down super early (tonight it was 5:20), but again, crying for long periods (very uncharacteristic).  The BETTER part is that she's doing longer stretches once she IS down.  She still needs to eat twice a night (per pediatrician's suggestion due to slow weight gain - AKA burn every calorie as quickly as possible), but last night did an 8 hour stretch after her 1st meal.  That's excellent, I'll take it, and I hope we continue to progress.  Goodness knows, I'd love to see the backs of my eyelids a bit more.

So if you're out there struggling too... you're not alone!  We need a support group message board or something.  Hoping for success for all of you out there.  Sleep babies, sleep............