Our very cute, but very early, wake-up call

Sonia has always been a pretty good sleeper (or at least since she was 4-5 months old). We never really had to let her cry it out for long periods of time, she just sort of figured out how to sleep through the night around the age she was supposed to (I'm sure you all remember the countless blog posts on this topic right around then).

So, I guess karma is paying us back now because we are back to getting up in the middle of the night, every night. It started when Sonia got sick and wasn't eating very much during the day, and then was waking at night both because she had a fever and was genuinely hungry. So we were giving her a bottle or two at night and she would go back to sleep. I knew this wasn't ideal, but she was sick, and you break all of the rules when your kid is sick. Flash forward to now when she is all better, but she is still waking up somewhere between 2-5am to have a nightly bottle. And of course now it's totally different than when she was 5 months old and doing the same thing because she's big enough to stand up, hold on to the edge of the crib, throw her pacifier onto the floor (yes, another habit we need to break), and cry as loud as she can. We go in with all the intentions of just comforting her (no food), but she's onto our plan now. She starts to basically scream, and raise her arms up, and you can just look at her and know that she is not going to go back to sleep anytime soon. And, honestly, it's hard to resist it when your 10-month old leans over the top of her crib and tries to hug your waist because she's so happy to see you. So we give her a bottle (which she drains like she has never seen food before), and then she happily goes back to sleep.

Now, the "right" thing to do would probably be to let her cry it out, and I'm sure that would work. But of course that would mean we were all up for a long time in the middle of the night, and at 3am it is hard not to take the path that gets everyone (us included) back to sleep as soon as possible. We should also probably still enforce her usual wakeup time (6:30am) even if she wants to sleep later (because she isn't hungry in the morning), but again it's hard to force yourself to wake up earlier than you absolutely have to because it's the "right" thing to do. Of course, it was a lot easier before to do all the "right" things when I didn't have to get up in the morning and go to work all day...I keep searching online for the article that says "How to get your 10-month old to sleep through the night again and not lose any sleep yourself," but for some reason Google can't seem to find it.

It was almost like this morning she sensed she needed to be her cutest to make up for the accumulated sleep debt of her parents...here she is playing "peekaboo" around my laptop (and you can almost see her two little teeth in this photo).