Sleepless in Seattle ...

How true it is. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks have got nothing on us.

After E's teething/cold/stuffy-nose/sickness thing he had going on he got a little used to spending the night in his mom and dad's bed. Once he was feeling a bit better we (or maybe it was just me?) decided something needed to change. As much as I love cuddling with him, he seems to have inherited his Dad's sleeping habits.

If you're wondering about those sleeping habits, let me paint you a picture. I like to sleep curled up in a ball on my side. I usually sleep on the edge of the bed because then I can wrap a foot out of the covers more easily. Ben, however (and not that I'm complaining at all) usually ends up either half laying on top of me or at least has his back pressed up against me. Well, add a little guy into the mix who somehow just gravitates to me and then Ben who also winds up laying about in the middle of the bed and we have a Brooke who is sleeping on about 5 inches of mattress which ... doesn't really make for much sleep.

ANYWAY, the point of this picture is that I love cuddling with E but I wasn't sleeping well because I was worried I was going to smother him in my sleep and because it's hard to sleep with only 5 inches of mattress space. That being said, Thursday night was rough. He was feeling better but he kept waking up wanting to come into bed with us. I was firm and rocked him to "sleep" even though minutes after putting him back in bed he'd be crying again.

Well, Friday came ... We'd already had one rough night so what was two? We decided to try a little "cry it out". He woke up at 2am and cried for 3 minutes. I went in and checked on him. He continued crying for another .... 7 minutes. Once the 7 minutes were up, I was in there making sure he wasn't smothering himself somehow or wedged in the slats. Then he cried for another 13 minutes. And, just as my 13 minute alarm went off, his cries stopped and he slept until 8 in the morning.

23 minutes on night 1. It was a torturous 23 minutes but I could handle 23 minutes and it could only get better from there, right?

HA! WRONG!

Night 2 - Saturday: 11:30pm He cries for 50 minutes before finally settling down.
4am - I know I got up to check on him twice before he fell asleep but it was 4am and I had a super bad migraine so I don't actually know long the crying lasted. I believe it was only 15 minutes-ish.

Then he woke up at 7:30am so I brought him into bed with us for a few hours.

Night 3 - Sunday: We'd gone to our friends house for dinner and games so we didn't get home until 10pm and he doesn't nap well anyway on Sundays so he was exhausted. I was hoping this would work to our advantage. Wrong. AGAIN.

2am .... He cried for ..... a long time. About an hour. It turns out an hour of crying at 2am seems a lot longer than an hour of crying at 11:30pm - when I haven't actually fallen asleep yet. Ben gave up on trying to sleep at 3am and decided to finish some stuff for his rotation. Ironically, E chose that exact moment to finally fall back to sleep.

Well, it's Night 4. There was a short 2 second cry at 11:30pm.

I'm not getting my hopes up, in fact, my will may have dwindled. If there's no progress, E may be spending the night back in our bed. There's only so many hours of crying I can stand. And I passed that about 3 nights ago so .... my brain hurts. I'm exhausted and I want to break down and cry myself. The only thing that's kept me going is that I need sleep. Desperately. In fact, I should probably sleep right now so I'll update this tomorrow. Hopefully after getting 7 hours straight of sleep. hahah. We'll see.