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November 20th, 2003 - Thursday Behavior Blues If you've been online longer than five minutes, you've probably seen an e-mail joke that's been floating around for years. I get it via forward about once a year. It's very cute. It's a list of fake titles of children's books that never got published, including "You're Different and That's Bad" and "All Cats Go To Hell". You can see one version of the list here. Anyway, one of the books is titled "Daddy Drinks Because You Cry". It's always been one of my favorites. After this past week, I've contemplated writing a children's book of my own and getting it published. I would like to call it "Mommy Drinks Because You Discovered The Art Of Throwing A Tantrum". Or perhaps I could write a useful self-help book for parents and title it "Recreational Drinking: Ways to Deal With Your Child's Temper Tantrums". Yes, it HAS been fun around here, why do you ask? It's not like Hayley had her very first tantrum this week. She's had a couple before but this week it was just one after the other. She woke up on Monday and seemed fine. She got tired and took her standard afternoon nap. She woke up from that and it was all downhill. Deny her something breakable? Scream, scream, cry. Try to take something away from her that she shouldn't play with? Scream, scream, cry. Try to pry something out of her hands so that she can get changed into clothes? Scream, scream, cry. Say no when she tries to have another Baby Einstein video put on? Scream, scream, cry. Do anything/say anything that doesn't go with her own plans? Yes, you guessed it: Scream, scream, cry. Holy crap. It's been a long week. Luckily she was very happy today because otherwise I was considering trading her in for a nice, quiet goldfish. At least the majority of the day has been good. Ever since George came home and went into the computer room she's been kind of angry. She wants to go in there so that she can try to touch everything but he's taking a computer apart and so there are too many pieces everywhere. She threw herself to the floor and screamed when I tried to pick her up, and then sat on the floor and cried when I wouldn't let her go further than the doorway. I managed to distract her by offering up "Baby Neptune". Half an hour of happiness! Temper tantrums are FUN! As if that wasn't enough joy and entertainment, Hayley has developed a new, lovely habit of waking up anywhere between 4 and 4:30 am. That alone wouldn't be the end of the world, except that she won't go back to sleep until at least 6 or 6:30 am. It's killing me. All I want is to go back to sleep but she won't have any of that nonsense. See it used to be easy because she'd wake up at whatever time, I'd nurse her, and she'd go back to sleep. Then I would too. Then I started following Dr. Jay Gordon's ten day plan for night weaning. The basic gist of it is, in ten days (or maybe a little more), your child no longer had milk at night. During the day, it was an open bar, so to speak, but for at least seven hours each night, there was to be no milk. He warned that it could be a little rough in the beginning, especially when you hit the part of the ten day plan that involved not offering any milk at all. For us, it was great. The first three days, between 11 pm and 6 am, if she woke up, she got a little milk, but I would stop nursing before she went back to sleep, then rub her head and back and "shhh" her until she was asleep. It was amazing. She settled easily each time. The next days involved not giving her any milk at all when she woke up in that time slot, skipping straight ahead to reassuring her, patting her back, and cuddling her until she fell asleep. On day five and on day eight, she was up for about an hour and a half in the middle of the night, but then everything was fine. We started this plan on the 2nd of November. By the 12th, the plan was over. She had slept through the night (anywhere from five to nine hours straight through - nine hours was longer than she had ever slept before!) on several occasions because of it. I was stunned and thrilled. And then, last Thursday, it stopped. Since then, she has woken up several times each night, and since Friday she has also done her little game of staying up for two to two and a half hours a night. I'm finding it hard to get much done, I'm crankier than usual, and I live for my morning coffee. I'm not sure how to approach this problem. I have to go look through his site and see if he has any new suggestions. However, if you happen to have used his system with some success and have any advice, I'd love to hear it. I'm tired of watching the sky get lighter as Hayley bounces around the bed, alternating between playing with my pillow and her stuffed puppy, tossing and turning, and whining for milk that she's not really supposed to have. Yawn. The worst part about last night was that I couldn't sleep for some reason so I was up until almost midnight reading, and then I was up from 4:15 until 6:30. Gah. At least she's really cute. And she did choose a time when I was getting really exasperated to grab my face in the dark and pull me down so she could rub noses with me. Whine, whine. Anyone have some cheese and crackers to go with my whine? Quick! Cute picture time! 
Brushing her teeth before bed.
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Reading: The Davinci Code. It is SO hard to put that book down.
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