Yin Yang of parenting

Ade has recently decided she does not need to sleep at all during daylight hours. So, yesterday morning, she was crying from exhaustion and being cranky and tired, and I took her to the nursery to try to get her to sleep. I rocked her, bounced her til my feet had sunk into the floor, sang, everything possible until I was crying myself. I was thinking how I really don't know how people do this with more than one child, and how I was starting to agree with Ryan that we should change Ade's name to "OnlyChild." It is so frustrating that she wanted to sleep, and I also wanted her to sleep, and yet there we were. Neither of us doing what we wanted. All I could think about was the laundry I needed to do, the magazine I had been trying to read for a week, the dirty kitchen, taking a shower... It was a down moment for me.

Then, the day got better a little at a time, and I put on a better attitude. By evening, I decided to try to get her into her crib. I had read that babies who have fussy periods at night are probably just begging for an earlier bedtime. So I took Ade up to the nursery and put her in pajamas at 6:30pm. She fell sleep nursing with no crying or fussing at all. I had the heating pad and an old tshirt of mine in the crib to get it all warm and mommy-smelling (I took the heating pad out before putting Ade in - don't worry). I put her in the crib, and there she slept from 7:30-10pm! Ryan and I watched Big Brother without a baby between us in the bed. It was crazy. We were both wanting to go look in on her every two minutes, and at the slightest noise on the baby monitor I was sure she was going to wake up. So that was a high moment for us.

Funny how a single day can have both such awful and such wonderful moments.