Sleep Training

The official "sleep training" for my beast of a daughter began tonight. Luke and I secretly call her "The Beast" when she wails...it's our little private joke that we'll tell her about in front of her 1st boyfriend when she's 15.

I've taken the best advice from a handful of friends who've been there done that and a few ideas from some articles books and we've developed our own sleep training schedule.

Will it work? Hell if I know. It's only 9:19pm. The fun doesn't normally begin until 2am when Shelby decides that she needs to have loud conversations with her feet.

She's like that crazy drunk friend in college who just doesn't shut the hell up while you're trying to sleep. She talks to herself all night long. I've gotten to the point where I'm wearing ear plugs and have the monitor on the lowest setting to drown out her babbling.

And so a very tired and quickly aging Ziggy and I (mostly I, because he likes to wait and see if it works before he joins in) started sleep training.

Sleeping through the night (meaning myself) would absolutely change my life! I haven't slept througha night in over 7 months if you consider that I had the RLS in my last trimester and never slept.

And my God I love my daughter, but this is yet another time where I look at my sweet wonderful 9 year old self sufficient little man and realize how many wonderful, frustrating and scary years I have ahead of me before I can collapse next to a 9 year old Shelby on the sofa and just exhale for a little while in that glorious age where they aren't needy babies anymore, but they aren't horrible evil tweens yet either.

I hearby declare that 9 is the greatest age of childhood. Here's to Luke!

Wish us luck and a good night's sleep.