Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Things my daughter does (and won't do)

My babygirl is 14 months old now. Our efforts at disciplining and teaching manners to the holy terror are really paying off, as the babygirl now spontaneously says please (points tiny finger at desired object and says "p'ease!"), thank you ("'an'oo"), and even one time, you're welcome ("'oo'el'um"). She also goes and stands in the corner every time we tell the holy terror to do so. Clearly, she does not yet get the concept of punishment.

She climbs in and out of her crib when the rail is down (it is wedged in between my side of the bed and the wall), flips around in it, turns on the music on her crib mobile by kissing the control buttons, flops down on her face in it, and steals our pillows to put in it.

She picks up debris from the kitchen floor and puts it in the trash. Also, puts non-debris, such as her shoes and sippy cups, in the trash.

She throws things, with great force and delight, onto the floor. Things she likes to throw include her wooden Ikea blocks (shown below), pots and pans, and remote controls. The noisier, the better!

The list of age-appropriate things she won't do is short, consisting of only one item. However, this one item is VERY IMPORTANT, and the fact that she won't do it is causing great distress to her daddy and I. She will not sleep in her d@mned crib!!! At 13 months, we got her to sleep in it, no problem, for almost 3 weeks. Of course, we had to put her to sleep and then gently place her into the crib without waking her. But then, she decided she was all done with this crib nonsense (except, of course, for playing in it) and wanted back into Mama and Daddy's nice warm bed. We'll get her sound sleep, but as soon as she feels herself descending through space into the crib, she wakes up. The second she hits the crib mattress, she flips over and pops onto her feet, wailing in spectacularly heartrending fashion. Nothing will convince her to lie back down and go back to sleep; she cries until we take her back out and cuddle her in our bed.

Last night I took her to bed, got her to sleep, tried to put her into her crib and failed, and gave up, laying her down beside me to sleep. At midnight, about an hour before my husband usually comes to bed, she rolled off his side of the bed and woke me up screaming. There is no worse feeling in the world than waking up to your baby screaming, frantically feeling for her next to you in bed in the dark, and realizing that she's NOT THERE and that the screaming is coming from the floor. She wasn't hurt, but it took her a good 20 minutes to calm down and get back to sleep. I piled up all our spare pillows on my husband's side of the bed so she wouldn't roll off again before he got there.

I'm just about ready to try the cry-it-out method of getting her to sleep in her crib. My husband absolutely refuses, insists it won't work, but offers no alternate solutions. It's really getting frustrating. It was so nice having our bed back to ourselves for those three weeks, and both the babygirl and I slept much better that way. I can only hope we get her out of our bed sometime before she goes off to college.

Rare sightings of the mythical "infantus cribsleepus":


1 Comments:

Blogger Teri said...

I'm bound to feel your pain if I don't act soon. Just feels so good to cuddle the li'l bug...

1:32 PM  

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