Attack of The Not So Sleepy Baby

We've been trying to get Baby Girl to sleep in her crib the last few days. The results have been mixed at best. On the one hand she has fallen asleep on her own in her crib. On the other hand she usually spends an average of 35 minutes screaming at us, threatening us, and generally expressing her extreme displeasure with out decision to remove her from the adult bed.

Her screams range from the mildly displeased to the vengeful shrieks of a woman wronged. It is incredibly difficult to ignore and pretty painful to sit through. One the one hand we know that she is physically alright and isn't in any danger. On the other hand we can only imagine what she must be thinking about when she's in there all alone and very unhappy. The urge to run in and save her is pretty overwhelming.

The stupid part about all of this is that nobody has any answers on how to go about this. Let me rephrase that. Everybody has an answer on how to do this and none of them agree with each other. Some people say let the kid cry it out, some people hear that and accuse you of child abuse. They say if you let the kid cry it out, you're creating abandonment issues.

This I kind of scoff at. First of all, any abandonment issue we might possibly create is going to be wiped out the first time Baby Girl tries to go on a date I forcefully offer to chaperon. Odds are she'll be wishing we'd abandon her by the time it's all said and done.

Second of all, the times we have gone in to pick her up and comfort her, she breaks out in a huge grin as soon as we do. And it isn't a "oh my god, I'm so glad to see you, I was so scared" relieved grin. It's a "I win sucker!" grin.

So we'll see how it goes.

We're going to pick up a video monitor here pretty soon. The audio one is nice, but we can't tell if Baby Girl has her face buried in the corner, and Mommy, and I to some extent, have nightmares that she'll suffocate herself. So in the meantime we run into the other room to check on her every fifteen minutes or so (thank the Dr. Baby Jeebus for DVR pause buttons.).

Some friends of ours recently got one, and it works well for them. So well in fact that the husband has used it to ask his wife to come downstairs and make him breakfast. Luckily for me, our place isn't big enough for me to have to resort to that. I say luckily for me because, it is exactly the kind of thing I would do given the opportunity, and it probably wouldn't go over too well with Mommy.

The biggest benefit so far to having Baby Girl getting her own bed is that now Mommy and I have time to play snugglebunnies. After six months of sharing a bed with a little munchkin, it is kind of weird to have some alone time, and in some ways it's like starting to date all over again. Only this time, we're both well past the stage of being embarrassed about farting in front of each other.

I will say that I miss having Baby Girl to cuddle with. The attachment I feel for our little poop machine still amazes me from time to time.