Sleepless

Charlotte was up at again 5:30 this morning. For the past couple of weeks, it seems our little girl has turned some sort've unfortunate corner and isn't sleeping quite as well as she used to (see earlier report here). To add insult to injury, she's also developed a new variety of cry that sounds as painful to make as it is to listen to; a sort've low, chord-straining note that she extends for as long as her little lungs and larynx can push it, bookended by hiccupy coughs. Imagine, if you will, the sound of someone attempting to bisect a marble column with a diminutive chainsaw and you're on the right track. According to the book, From Contented Baby to Confident Child by Gina Ford, this kind of episode is not unheard of. Being that Charlotte has just started at a day care program twice a week, it's evidently not at all uncommon for a little person in her situation to react this way. She loves going to day care, but the changes in her routine periodically send her into a frothy-mouthed tailspin. Ford's methods of dealing with these sorts of outbursts, however, seem pretty dubious (she suggests circumventing tantrums via baking pastry --- rather a tall and unlikely order in our household). We've been attempting to placate her with bottles of milk, but that's already problematic, being that we're trying to get her off the bottle and exlusively onto the dreaded "sippy cup" (and offering her a sippy cup when she's in this sort've strop is somewhat akin to handing her a blunt projectile, as she will use it accordingly). So, failing everything else, we're just dealing with it. When she angrily greets the pre-dawn with her new throaty yawp, we simply let her cry. Or at least we let her cry for as long as we can stand it. We'd close our door, but that's both callous and impractical. It's like trying to sleep with someone in the next room sporadically pressing an air horn. But if you relent and go in too soon, you're sending the wrong message (i.e. all she has to do is cry and you'll come running). Go in too late, though, and she'll have worked herself up into such an impenetrable state of stiff-backed inconsolability that you'll have to spend the next forty-five minutes talking her down as she spiritedly voices her pronounced displeasure with the current management. It can be draining and discouraging.

Somewhat paradoxically, throughout the rest of the day, Charlotte behaves absolutely angelically. I just heard from the wife that despite Charlotte's one-baby invocation of Hell this morning, she's currently in the cheeriest of little moods, chirping and babbling happily as she toddles about the playground. Here's hoping that she got whatever it was that had been bothering her off her chest this morning and that tonight she'll sleep. Sadly, it is an inexact science. Stay tuned.