Sleeeep!

So Zosia's been having some sleep issues recently and a large part of me wishes i could wiggle my fingers at her, shout "SLEEP!" dramatically, and have her sleep through the night. Now I know that in the grand scheme of parenting, her sleep issues are minor. Some of our friends have been dealing with serious sleep stuff for several months now, and Zo herself had more severe issues in the first year of her life. Of course, that's when we were living in a SINGLE ROOM with NO BATHROOM in THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, so it's understandable that things might have been difficult. Not that having no bathroom had anything to do with her not sleeping well, of course, but it really did suck. Damn you, Sergio Martinez. Seriously.

But I digress. Right before the holidays, Zo learned how to climb out of her crib. She announced this with a thump, and by the time we got down to her room, fearing a separated shoulder at best, she was already downstairs on the couch, asking for some milk. Never mind that it was 4 in the morning. The next day we took one side off her crib, and voila -- Big Girl Bed. She's taken to it very easily; we keep a chair right next to it so she doesn't roll out, though I think that's probably unnecessary.

The problem, however, is that since it's very easy for her to get out of bed, she does. Every night. Multiple times. She gets out of bed, opens her door, walks down the hall (usually whimpering a bit), and climbs the stairs to our room. Usually I'm awake by then, and I meet her at the top of the stairs, turn her around, and put her back in bed (then I drain the washing machine, which has started mysteriously filling with water, but that's a story for another post). I head back to bed, hopeful that I can get another couple hours of sleep before the next one.

(BTW D-Jo does take her back to bed sometimes, but seeing how she's in her third trimester it seems like a bad idea for her to sleepily traverse the steep stairs multiple times in the night, so I do it the majority of the time.)

We've tried a number of different tactics to try to get her to stop. We try not engaging her, and mutely taking her back to bed. We try talking to her at bedtime about what she should do, which she happily parrots back to us: "no go out! Stay in!" We try plying her with the stickers that worked so well with the potty-training, but all that leads to is a morning spent repeating the same thing ad nauseam: "I got out! I didn't stay in! No stickers!"

We tried being nice, soothing her by rubbing her back while she falls asleep, but in true give-an-inch take-a-mile fashion, that resulted in Zo screaming "RUB IT!! RUB IT!! RUUUUUBBBBB IIIIIITTT!!!" at the top of her lungs, and it was really hard to get to sleep between her screaming and our laughter.

Over the last week she's settled into a pattern of getting up three or four times a night, and it looks like we're going to need to move to drastic measures before I end up talking about my daughter the way Louis C.K. talked about his on The Daily Show earlier this week:



Tonight, we lock her bedroom door and hope that she goes to the door, tries to get out, gives up, and goes back to bed.

God, I hope it works.