How to Sleep Train Your Dragon

As I might have whined about mentioned in my previous blog post, we've been having some trouble getting Lady Infant to sleep more than three hours together at night. It started about three weeks ago and was starting to really put a strain on our sanity. You'd think that after successfully sleep and nap training one child, we'd feel like we had some idea of what to do, but every child really is different. Sir Toddler had night feedings until he was nine months old, but he didn't regress for long periods of time like this little lady has. We were also able to get him to sleep through the night by replacing the last feeding with a sippy cup of water, because he was so much older.  Between the exhaustion and the stubbornness of Queen Baby, I felt like a new mom all over again. Humble pie be ours.

After I finally admitted to myself that I was out of ideas, I reached out to our beloved pediatrician via our online medical records service and both she and the RN in the office told us to go ahead and eliminate night feedings, and use the Ferber method. I tend to shy away from strict "methods" in parenting, but I do know from my limited experience how important consistency is, plus we'd used some version of Ferber with Sir Toddler without permanently scarring him (as far as I can tell).  So we decided to let Lady Infant cry herself back to sleep at night, checking on her every 10-15 minutes.

I hope Roger Goodell doesn't find out about our improperly inflated air mattress.

Since she was waking up not fussing, but screaming her head off most nights, we made the crazy insane decision to sleep on an air mattress in our living room. It was kind of like a weird sleepover. We set up white noise in her room, turned on a fan in ours, plugged in the baby monitor, and braced ourselves after her 10 PM feeding for a long night. Our plan, if she woke and cried, was to switch off the baby monitor, set a timer for 10 minutes, and then switch it back on after it went off to see if she was still crying.

The long night...wasn't. Mr. Husband nobly checked on her once and soothed her after her first ten minutes of crying, and then she was asleep by the time the second timer went off. We did another night in the living room and didn't have to go back up at all, so we decided to take the bold step of moving back into our own bed. It became apparent to us, however, that Lady Infant is quite aware that her roommates include The Food (me) and The Fun One (Mr. Husband), so we MacGyvered a little privacy screen.

Lady Infant still likes to wake up and squawk in the middle of the night, but instead of screaming her head off for hours, she fusses for a few minutes and puts herself back to sleep. Mr. Husband and I are eagerly anticipating the day these wakings stop so that we can move her into Sir Toddler's room, but for now we're sleeping better and everyone is happier.

How do you deal with sleeping woes?

Home Improvement

For almost three years now, we've lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a 135-year-old building. Our abode is rife with, erm, character, so much that it deserves its own rant post. We've been furnishing and decorating with a modest budget since we moved in. There's a limit on how much we want to invest in a money pit rental like this, but since it looks like we'll be here for at least another year, I've been trying to focus on small things that have been bugging me for a while.

Sometimes I do something big, like downsizing the coffee table and moving some furniture in the living room to make it seem bigger, or at least big enough for two small children to peacefully coexist.

Did I take any "before" pictures? Nope. Can I find the panorama I took a few months ago of the "after?" Nope. But do you like my choice of furniture moving pads?

Time to remove the broken child lock and sticker from the diaper pail.

Ta-da! All shiny and Pinterest-y.

And maybe even replace the lamp with the smashed base on the changing table with something the toddler can't kick off during a diaper change.

 This lamp was a placeholder from the Salvation Army, anyways.

Thanks, IKEA.

While the smashed lamp went to the dumpster, the shade was too cute to waste.

It had a crack in it on the wall side.

Boy, that really classed up the $2 lamp from a different thrift store.

While I was at HomeGoods in search of window treatment inspiration, I found two of these:

The best part? The FLAT PLUG.

Do you ever have that problem? Where you always walk out of HomeGoods with what you weren't looking for? Anyways, this led to a little power strip rotation I'd been wanting to do for some time.

This is behind the couch. The not-flat plug was getting bent, which made me nervous since, well, upholstery plus electricity? Note the cable to our router has been drilled THROUGH THE FLOOR.

This also eliminates the visual clutter of the Squid, which is now hidden in our desk. That thing is such an aesthetic burden, but I got it on clearance, ok?!

Flat plug fits behind the couch!

Then there was our super sophisticated method of powering appliances on the kitchen counter, since

some brilliant person wired an outlet at floor level. THROUGH THE CABINET. So, with the Squid in the desk, I moved the desk power strip to improve this little wiring fiasco. I pinned this tip about photocopying the back of something to aid with drilling a few years ago...

I freaking love using the drill.

So much less MacGyvor-y than the extension cord I picked up at Rite-Aid 6 years ago.

Where's the other flat-plug power strip, you might ask? It's now behind the bed. We have four outlets in our bed room, once centered on each wall. I didn't take pictures of our mattress (sitting on the bed rails that came with it, not a bed frame with a fancy headboard or anything) bending the plugs our our bedside lamps, or the baby monitor plugged into an extension cord curling around the hutch on my dresser but I'm sure you can imagine how fire-hazardly that looked.

I'm sorry if this was the most boring blog post that you've ever read It's just that sometimes the smallest things make a big impact in convenience. (And fire safety.) Do you rent or own? How do you shore up the limitations of your living space?

a bad case of the Mondays

I hate Mondays for a multitude of reasons. The laundry hampers and the trash are always overflowing, the kids are usually grouchy from missing naps on the weekend, and we always hate facing the next long workweek without Mr. Husband.

This weekend had the perfect storm of

(Photo credit)

Closing a show. Does that mean we're out of the woods now? Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the opportunity to make some extra money for our family and keep up my professional skills, but playing musicals takes such a toll on our family. I'm out late for many nights in a row and a zombie during the day, the housework suffers, my patience with the kids fizzles, and I don't see much of Mr. Husband.

Taking the kids to visit the in-laws. I'm fortunate that my in-laws are really nice and don't live super far away from us. Sir Toddler in particular gets to enjoy running around a yard that isn't mined with dog poop and has insane luxury features like BACKYARD WATER SPIGOTS THAT ARE HOOKED UP TO ACTUAL PIPES and thus can be used to fill kiddie pools. (Our single spigot is in the front of our unit and hooked up to...nothing! But our practical joke of an apartment is worthy of its own post.) Mr. Husband and I can relax while our kids enjoy their grandparents, and in general these visits aren't a bad thing at all. But spending a day at a normal house also reminds me of our apartment's many shortcomings, and a day away from home means no housework gets done after a musical week where nothing got done either.

This is only a quarter of the mess that was adorning our living room this morning.

Our ceiling was sanded. Over a year ago, an ice dam in a pipe draining through the ceiling (?!) caused water to come through the ceiling in the kitchen. Although our landlord was prompt in fixing the leak and patching the ceiling, the extra step of sanding had to wait until everything was dry. He told us to remind him to come finish the job, but it's amazing how quickly you get used to looking at a patch in your ceiling and forget to send that reminder. In any case, we finally remembered to remind him, so the ceiling is fixed, but now EVERYTHING in the kitchen is covered in a fine white powder...floor, furniture, pots and pans, baby toys...EVERYTHING.  This means extra chores on top of the normal chores that have been building up. I kind of miss that ceiling patch.

But all of this would be tolerable if it weren't for

Queen Baby, ruiner of sleep and all that is sanity. I haven't had a decent night's sleep in over three weeks. Right up until then, Lady Infant was starting to sleep six and seven hour stretches. Then some sixth sense must have alerted her to my upcoming show, and she decided the night before the sitzprobe to start waking up every two to three hours. I assumed this was a growth spurt, so I fed her and put her back to sleep with each waking for a few nights and assumed it would get better when she got through it.

But it hasn't gotten better. It's gotten worse.

Three weeks. Three bleeping weeks enduring hours of screaming despite all the rocking and binky-holding-in that we can muster. Mr. Husband's and my conversations have gone from "she'll just have to fuss it out" to "maybe we can sleep in the living room tonight? or put her Pack'n'Play in the basement?"

So it's a Monday to out-Monday all other Mondays, and I'm fighting the good fight against the worst pessimistic, self-pitying baditude I've had in a while. How do you get through the Monday blues?