Exhaustion

How is it August already? Where is the time going so fast?! The past 2 weeks have been really busy and I'm just now having a moment to write a quick update. Last weekend we were at a family reunion in WV which was a lot of fun. We spent close to 3 days with a lot of Dave's step-mom's family members that we don't get to see very often. Early the next day I flew to Dallas for 2 days of busy work meetings. A new project with the USPS has been keeping me extra occupied at work.

Tempered in with the busy last 2 weeks is a total lack of sleep these days. We're not exactly sure what is going on with Corinne but wanting to sleep through the night isn't high on her priority list. We can rule out illness and it doesn't appear to be teething related that I can see. I guess if I had to speculate I'd say it is related to almost walking unassisted. If I can recall, I think we went though something like this right before she crawled. Now if only I can recall how long it lasted....

But lately Cori is up for multiple hours during the night. One night this past week, she was up from midnight to 6 AM (no exaggerating). Sometimes she twitches and will only sleep when held, other times she just out-right screams for hours, and then sometimes she will sleep for an hour, wake up and then take an hour to go back down, and then wake up in another hour, etc. I think the most frustrating part is that one week she will be totally fine and sleep undisturbed, and then we'll have a week of not sleeping well at all. It goes back and forth like a ping-pong ball. And she is taking a really long time to fall asleep as well; the usual bedtime of 7 / 7:30 PM is more like 8:30 / 9 PM these days.

Needless to say Mom & Dad are wiped out. If I'm really honest with myself, I know we need to re-Ferberize. But I hate hearing her scream, and since Ferber fell by the wayside around 9 / 10 months, we haven't been doing it. And we really haven't needed to until recently. She was sleeping great for months! Now it's pretty much a bad habit that generally Cori needs held to fall back asleep. It pains me to say that because I love rocking her to sleep and holding her while she dozes. But it no longer takes just a few mintues to accomplish; it's more like hours now. And these sleep-deprived nights are building on one another that we can't take it anymore.

Efforts to re-institute sleep training for a few days this week have failed miserably. It sucks when you know you should do this because in the long run, it's better for your kid. But the "here & now" aspect just bites. Is there a patron saint of sleep that I can pray to?? The next blog update will depend on when Cori returns to "normal" and I get more than a few winks here and there.